Effects of Language Variety and Word Availability in Commercial Advertisements on Listener’s Lexical Recall

Abstract

Commercial advertisements in Arabic-speaking regions tend to alternate between dialectal Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, but it is not yet clear whether language variety has any impact on listener’s lexical recall. Insight into this issue should help enterprises design their commercial advertisements in a linguistically intelligent manner. This study addresses two questions: 1) How does language variety (dialectal vs. standard) affect listener’s lexical recall in commercial advertisements? 2) Do listeners recall words that have appeared in dialectal advertisements better than those that did not appear in advertisements using the same variety? Fifteen Saudi participants responded to a forced-choice memory test with 24 yes-no questions (3 per advertisement) asking participants to report whether they heard a specific key word in eight advertisements that utilized different language varieties. The findings show that Arabic speakers tend to perceive both Modern Standard Arabic and dialectal Arabic in commercial advertisements similarly, but tend to recall the presence of a key word in an advertisement better than its absence. Future research may increase the sample size and examine more Arabic varieties.