Language Emotionality
The finding that text feels more emotional to bilingual people in their native language than in a second language.
What it is
Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe and Stijn van Osselaer reported it across five experiments with bilingual consumers in 2009. On this site it is read alongside Communication Accommodation Theory.
In effect
The effect was not explained only by stereotypes attached to particular languages or by weaker comprehension, and it depended on how often the words had been met in native rather than second-language settings. The authors proposed a language-specific episodic trace account.
What it does not say
It is not the same thing as Communication Accommodation Theory, 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
- Stefano Puntoni is first author, with Bart de Langhe and Stijn van Osselaer, of Bilingualism and the Emotional Intensity of Advertising Language, published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2009.
- First author of the study that compared online user ratings against objective quality measures across 1,272 products in 120 categories, and found they did not converge.