Uncovering the cognitive duality of bilinguals through word association

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the nature of the cognitive structures of bilingual consumers. The article begins by describing a psycholinguistic model that suggests that bilinguals have different structures for each of the languages they know. In a marketing context, this model implies that even the perfect translation of a marketing communication may not have the same meaning as the original. The article proposes that word‐association tasks may help marketers gain insight into the dual cognitive structures of bilingual consumers and discover possible differences in meaning across languages. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.