ABSTRACT
Phonology and semantics are fundamental building blocks of a linguistic system. This chapter explores phonological and semantic properties of different languages by investigating how consumers respond to brand names in an international marketing context. Linguists have distinguished two major types of writing systems: phonographic systems (English), where written words represent the sound components of the spoken language; and logographic systems (Chinese), where written "sign" symbols represent both words and concepts. Language proficiency refers to how well individuals can process a particular language, and if individuals speak several languages, how well they can process any of these languages. Consumer researchers have paid surprisingly little attention to bilingual information processing and decision making in general, and brand names in particular. To give the reader a sense of the necessity and extent of linguistic examination and pretesting, the chapter describes the procedures in some detail.
