SEMANTICS IN ADVERTISEMENTS

Semantics in Advertisements

Semantics in Advertisements

Introduction

Having learnt about levels of processing in Psychology it has made me think more about the meaning of words and how we decipher that meaning. Levels of Processing suggests that stimuli can be encoded and processed at varying levels/depths from shallow to deep. It shows that the long term memory store is not just a simple storage unit but a complex processing system.

There are at least three levels of processing, visual, acoustic and semantic. Visual processing involves analysing the visual appearance (orthography components) of a word. Acoustic processing is about the sound (based on the phonemic components) of the word for example 'does it rhyme'? And semantic processing analyses the meaning of the word. I am particularly interested in semantic processing and how it links with memory. I am interested to find out what features make words stand out and make a word/sentence memorable and to see how these techniques are used in advertising in that they have a lasting affect on the person reading the advert.

Methodology

The experimental design was independent groups. The sample was opportunist because a class of 17-18 year old college students were available to take part in my experiment, so it was convenient. I conducted a memory experiment which involved a word list incorporating both visual and semantic processing through questions. I compiled a list of words and assigned a question to each word. Some questions led to visual processing e.g. 'Is the word in capital letters?' this questions requires the reader to analyse the appearance of the word. The other questions led to semantic processing e.g. 'Is this a type of food?' This forces the reader to think about what the word means, not just what it looks like. Some of the words are in different colours, some in capital letters or underlined and some ordinary typed words. I did this to see if any of these graphological features have an affect on memory. Advertisers must use certain features to make their advert stand out and memorable. At the bottom of the page was a distracter task to minimise demand characteristics that may give the participants cues as to what the experiment is trying to find out. Demand characteristics would affect the results and make them unreliable as participants may change their behaviour to suit what they think the observer is trying to find out. The independent variable was the word list that the experimenter designed and controlled, the dependent variable was the results (number of words recalled), the experimenter cannot control this. The number of words recalled and the words themselves are of primary interest to me as a language investigator. I gave the word list to the participant and asked them to answer the questions. They had three minutes to do this. I then collected the list and answers from them. I pressed record on the tape player and asked the participant to recall as many words as they could from the word ...