Developing intercultural communicative skills

Handout 2
Linguistic Differences
The differences between Eastern and Western culture have been researched from
various self and social behavior perspectives. Schmitt, Pan, and Tavassoli discussed “the face saving culture” (Ho, 1972, p32), sense of time (Hall, 1976), and “individualismcollectivism” (Hofstede, 1980). Meanwhile, the influence of cultural difference from the branding and advertisements perspective, such as brand name, brand loyalty, gift giving and receiving, and consumers‟ satisfaction, is also apparent. Previous studies show that consumers from different cultural background have different evaluation results of the contents of specific ads.
The nature of the linguistic sign is interlinked between different languages: “a linguistics sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern.” (Saussure, p. 66). A sound pattern is different from a sound. A sound pattern is people‟s psychological impression of a sound, comparing sound pattern with another element associated with it in a linguistic sign, the other element means the concept.
The linguistic differences of different languages also have influences on symbol
designs. For example, Chinese language is based on ideographic writing systems.
However, Western languages like English are based on phonetic system. This will affect the Chinese and non-Chinese‟s perception of symbols. Language is the most important part of a culture, people use language to communicate their thoughts and form ideas. The difference between languages also has influence on mental representations. When communicating an idea to a friend, Chinese people tend to be very implicit, especially when rejecting something from someone. Words are
carefully selected to avoid hurting others‟ feelings. Western languages like English are more direct in comparison to Chinese. Showing people‟s true feelings is generally more important than others‟ feelings. Schmitt, Pan and Tavassoli studied the impact of linguistic differences between Chinses and English to provide a framework for examining “how structural differences between ideographic and alphabetic languages may influence mental representations and impact consumer memory.” In their study, the authors conducted a survey of sixty Chinese students from Beijing and fifty-nine US students from Chicago. There are three sets of designs, including Chinese vs. English, auditory presentation mode vs. visual presentation mode, spoken memory mode vs. written for recall memory mode. Both group members are native speakers and cannot speak any other languages at all. The authors found that “language is at the core of a culture. It is central to communication and closely related to thought.”. “Sixteen brand names were randomly paired for each subject with 16 common consumer products.” All of them are very common brands that can be found in both United States and China. The authors designed auditory-presentation-mode and visual presentation-mode. In the auditory-presentation mode, participants listened to the recording of product categories and sixteen brand names. In the visual-presentation mode, participants were shown the brand names written on index cards. After these two modes were finished, the spoken recall condition and written-recall condition tests were conducted. During the spoken recall condition, participants were asked to recall as many brand names as they could in two minutes. During the written-recall condition, participants were assigned to write down all the brand names they could recall in two minutes. The study indicates that “Chinese consumers are more likely to recall information when the visual memory rather than phonological memory trace is accessed". On the contrary, English native speakers are more likely to recollect the information when the phonological trace is accessed compared to the visual trace. The suggestion to marketers is to strengthen the natural trend of “Chinese consumers to rely on visual representations and English-speaking consumers' natural tendency to rely on phonological representations”. The validity of the conclusions of this study is limited by choice of dependent variables, due to some brand names that were not very meaningful.