Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Lexical, syntactic, and phonological fluency <s> Three experiments investigated the effects of syntactic complexity on the persuasiveness of advertising. Experiment 1 showed that, in a broadcast advertising context, syntactic complexity affects recall and recognition but not the persuasiveness of the advertising. However, Experiment 2 indicated that, in a print context, persuasiveness of an advertisement is affected by syntactic complexity. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrated that motivation to process information interacts with syntactic complexity to determine the persuasiveness of print advertising. These results imply that the impact of syntactic complexity on advertising effectiveness is more complicated than previously thought. <s> BIB001 </s> Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Lexical, syntactic, and phonological fluency <s> This paper describes and explains some regularities in the frequency of numbers in text. An analysis of number frequencies in text corpora in Dutch, English, German, and French confirms the expectation that frequency is highly dependent on two factors: magnitude and roundness. Roundness (defined as number frequency in an approximation context) proves to be related to three arithmetical properties: ‘10-ness’, ‘2-ness’, and ‘5-ness’. In predicting the frequency of numbers irrespective of their context ‘2½-ness’ should be added to these factors, as is suggested in the work of Sigurd (1988). The role of the four number characteristics found in this study can be explained by the preference of the language user for using base numbers, and for doubling and halving quantities. <s> BIB002 </s> Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Lexical, syntactic, and phonological fluency <s> Most texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly-complex words. However, a majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence. This paper explores the extent to which this strategy is effective. Experiments 1–3 manipulate complexity of texts and find a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence. This relationship held regardless of the quality of the original essay, and irrespective of the participants' prior expectations of essay quality. The negative impact of complexity was mediated by processing fluency. Experiment 4 directly manipulated fluency and found that texts in hard to read fonts are judged to come from less intelligent authors. Experiment 5 investigated discounting of fluency. When obvious causes for low fluency exist that are not relevant to the judgement at hand, people reduce their reliance on fluency as a cue; in fact, in an effort not to be influenced by the irrelevant source of fluency, they over-compensate and are biased in the opposite direction. Implications and applications are discussed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. <s> BIB003 </s> Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Lexical, syntactic, and phonological fluency <s> Abstract Consumers often like fluently processed stimuli. The authors find that one source of fluency for numerical stimuli is the generation of a number through common addition (e.g., 1 + 1 through 10 + 10) and common multiplication (2 × 2 through 10 × 10) problems (study 1). Common addition and multiplication problems (arithmetic), or their operands, can be used to prime a number and increase its fluency (study 3). The benefits of arithmetic and operand primes are limited to single primes (i.e., more primes are not necessarily better) (study 5). Number fluency is relevant to creating numeric brand names (study 2), enhancing the liking of numeric brand names through advertising (study 4), and executing price promotions (study 6). <s> BIB004 </s> Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Lexical, syntactic, and phonological fluency <s> The SEC's emphasis on the use of plain English is designed to make disclosures more readable and more informative. Using an experiment, I find that more readable disclosures lead to stronger reactions from small investors, so that changes in valuation judgments are more positive when news is good and more negative when news is bad. Drawing on research in psychology to explain this result, I predict and find that processing fluency from a more readable disclosure acts as a subconscious heuristic cue and increases investors’ beliefs that they can rely on the disclosure. Although I do not find that more readable disclosures directly increase perceptions of management credibility, I do find evidence of an indirect effect operating through feelings of processing fluency. In supplemental analyses, I find that investors who receive more readable disclosures revise their valuation judgments to be less extreme when they are explicitly made aware of the potential for variation in readability. I discuss potential explanations for these revised valuation judgments. <s> BIB005 </s> Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Lexical, syntactic, and phonological fluency <s> Names are rich sources of information. They can signal gender, ethnicity, or class; they may connote personality characteristics ranging from warmth and cheerfulness to morality. But names also differ in a much more fundamental way: some are simply easier to pronounce than others. Five studies provide evidence for the name-pronunciation effect: easy-to-pronounce names (and their bearers) are judged more positively than difficult-to-pronounce names. Studies 1–3 demonstrate that people form more positive impressions of easy-to-pronounce names than of difficult-to-pronounce names. Study 4 finds this effect generalizable to ingroup targets. Study 5 highlights an important real-world implication of the name-pronunciation effect: people with easier-to-pronounce surnames occupy higher status positions in law firms. These effects obtain independent of name length, unusualness, typicality, foreignness, and orthographic regularity. This work demonstrates the potency of processing fluency in the information rich context of impression formation. <s> BIB006 </s> Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Lexical, syntactic, and phonological fluency <s> This research investigates how the relationships among pieces of numerical information in a price promotional offer (i.e., regular price, sale price, absolute discount, and relative discount) affect deal processing fluency. Across four studies (including a field study involving purchase data collected from an online group-buying website), the authors show that when the numbers constitute an approximation sequence or are multiples of one another, deal processing fluency is increased, which influences deal liking and ultimately has an impact on consumers' price promotion predilection. In addition, this article demonstrates that when consumers are not highly motivated to process numerical information, they may choose deals that offer less economic value but feature a combination of numbers that they can more fluently process. This research has important implications for the type of numerical information marketers should include in price promotional offers. <s> BIB007 </s> Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Lexical, syntactic, and phonological fluency <s> ABSTRACT: We conduct two experiments to investigate how readability (high versus low) and benchmark performance consistency (consistent versus inconsistent) influence investors' judgments. Using prior management guidance and year-ago quarter performance as two benchmarks against which to assess actual earnings performance, we manipulate whether the valence of guidance performance (positive or negative) and the valence of trend performance (positive or negative) are consistent with each other. We also manipulate the readability of trend performance in our main experiment. Our results show that when benchmark performance is inconsistent, higher as opposed to lower readability of positive (negative) trend performance leads to more (less) favorable investors' performance judgments. This effect of readability is smaller when benchmark performance is consistent. We also show that higher readability in the inconsistent benchmark performance condition improves investors' understanding of the firm's current-quart... <s> BIB008 </s> Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Lexical, syntactic, and phonological fluency <s> Abstract Objective To assess the extent to which the title and font of participant information sheets (PISs) can influence pregnant women's and trainee midwives’ perceptions of an antenatal intervention. Methods Pregnant women ( n = 35) and trainee midwives ( n = 36) were randomly presented with one of four PISs where the title and font of the PIS had been manipulated to create four experimental conditions (i.e., Double Fluent ; Double Awkward ; Fluent Title-Awkward Font ; Awkward Title-Fluent Font ). After reading the PIS, participants rated their perceptions of the intervention (i.e., Attractiveness, Complexity, Expected Risk, Required Effort) using five-point Likert scales. Results A 4 × 2 factorial multivariate analysis of variance revealed that pregnant women rated the Double Awkward condition as significantly more complex than the Double Fluent ( p = .024) and Awkward Title-Fluent Font ( p = .021) conditions. Conclusion Font influenced pregnant women's ratings of intervention complexity. Practice implications Results have implications for ethical recruitment, and in turn, the optimisation of corresponding interventions. <s> BIB009
The subjective ease with which words are processed is termed lexical fluency; the subjective ease of parsing grammatical constructions is termed syntactic fluency; and the subjective ease of pronunciation is termed phonological fluency  . Collectively, these are referred to as linguistic fluency  . In general, highly readable materials are lexically and syntactically fluently processed; consequently, they generate more favorable evaluations of the message BIB003 BIB001 . Miller  measured the readability of financial reports of firms using readability measures. The results showed that more readable financial disclosures were associated with greater trading activity among small investors. Along similar lines, Rennekamp BIB005 adapted financial disclosure materials from those of a real company. Rennekamp created more readable and less readable versions of a financial report by manipulating such factors as sentence length, simplicity of terms, and ease of syntax. After reading the fluent or disfluent financial reports, participants were asked to estimate the appropriate common stock valuation, management competence, and trustworthiness of the firm. The fluent report generated stronger reactions: judgments were more positive to good news and more negative to bad news. Additionally, participants were more likely to feel they could trust a fluent report. A similar result is reported by Tan et al. BIB008 . Thus, highly readable materials generate more favorable evaluations and stronger reactions. The phonological ease of words also influences our judgments. Certain letter strings are easier to process than others. For example, English speakers cannot naturally pronounce the string "SBG" (disfluent), whereas they can easily pronounce the equally nonsensical "SUG" (fluent). Laham et al. BIB006 showed that people form more positive impressions of easily pronounceable names and their bearers (e.g., Mr. Smith vs. Mr. Colquhoun). They further revealed that people with easily pronounceable names occupied higher-status positions in firms. Dohle and Siegrist  found that easily pronounceable medications were perceived to be safer and have fewer side effects, and participants expressed greater willingness to buy them than medications that were difficult to pronounce. Thus, phonologically fluent words generate favorable evaluations BIB009 . Round numbers are also processed with linguistic fluency. Such round numbers as 10, 25, and 100 are frequently used because they can express approximate quantities and therefore refer to an entire range of magnitudes BIB002 . For example, one might refer to any given number within the range 90-110 (e.g., 93, 99, 102, and 106) as "about 100. " Accordingly, the number 100 is used more frequently and processed more fluently than those other numbers, leading to greater liking BIB002 BIB004 . Coulter and Roggeveen BIB007 investigated whether numbers that were members of a base-10 approximation sequence were preferred in a shopping context. The authors showed that prices and discount amounts that were members of an approximation sequence (e.g., $100, $30, $70, and 70% discount) generated greater liking and purchase intentions than did precise prices and discount amounts (e.g., $101, $29, $72, and 71%). Thus, round numbers generate more positive judgments.