If access to the bilingual lexicon takes place in a language independent way, monolingual repetition and masked form priming accounts should be directly applicable to bilinguals. We tested such an account (Grainger and Jacobs, 1999)

Research on foreign languages in advertising stresses the role of the match between product and language. Ads with a match are more effective; however, their effectiveness has not been compared to that of ads in the consumers' native language, which are not restricted to products with a match, but are used for a range of products. An experiment tested whether native ads were more effective than those utilizing foreign languages. We also took consumers' foreign language proficiency into account. Results suggest that foreign language is not the only key to success in advertising and effectiveness might also depend on the foreign language used.

No abstract

In many non-English-speaking countries, English loanwords in job ads seem to be very common. The question is whether this linguistic choice is advantageous, especially when the job advertised does not involve working in an international environment. Previous research of English loanwords in job ads has revealed that their effect in terms of the evaluation of the company, the job and the ad is limited if effects can be shown at all. Suggestions that English loanwords draw readers’ attention because this language choice deviates from what readers expect and, in addition, take more processing time (because they are foreign) lack empirical evidence. The eye-tracking and behavioural data of our experiment did not provide any empirical evidence for the attention-drawing function of English loanwords nor an influence on their effectiveness in job ads geared to graduate students in Germany. We suggest that loanwords need a certain amount of processing to be identified as foreign. This means they are different from other salient cues that were shown to draw readers’ attention because they are not subject to automatic processes. In addition, our participants were sufficiently proficient in English so that differences in processing time were not reflected in their eye-movement data.

In this chapter, we explore the universal and language-specific features of how we speak and think about dynamic temporal relations. Previous studies suggest that the availability of grammaticalised aspect affects temporal perspective-taking (e.g. Carroll, von Stutterheim, and Nüse 2004; von Stutterheim, Carroll, and Klein 2009). Adopting an experimental and crosslinguistic approach, the current chapter examines the role of grammar on Dutch and Japanese speakers’ understanding of the time course of events using the video clips of ongoing events. Results suggest that the interaction between the semantic characteristics of events and the grammatical inventory of language, rather than the sheer availability of grammaticalised aspect, may play an important role in speaker’s temporal perspective-taking in event descriptions.