Communication Accommodation Theory
The sociolinguistic idea that speakers adjust their language towards, or away from, the person they address, and that listeners read meaning into the adjustment.
What it is
Scott Koslow, Prem Shamdasani and Ellen Touchstone applied it to advertising language in 1994. On this site it is read alongside Language Emotionality.
In effect
In their study of print advertisements using different amounts of Spanish, readers who felt the advertiser was sensitive to their culture liked the advertisement more; with that perception held constant, advertisements entirely in Spanish were liked less.
What it does not say
It is not the same thing as Language Emotionality, which sits close to it on this site but describes a different part of how people decide. It also does not say that the finding reaches every product, buyer or setting; where this page goes beyond the cited research, the step is an inference and is labelled as one.
Sources
- Scott Koslow is first author, with Prem Shamdasani and Ellen Touchstone, of Exploring Language Effects in Ethnic Advertising: A Sociolinguistic Perspective, published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 1994.