This paper reports on a quantitative investigation into the occurrence of English in product advertisements in Dutch-speaking Belgium, French-speaking Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. For each country six issues of Elle in 2004 were collected and all ads of half a page or larger were analyzed, for a total of 2,384 different ads. More than two-thirds of those ads contained one or more English words. The actual occurrence of English was low, since 90 per cent of the ads with English were partly in English and partly in the local language, and only 13 per cent of the total amount of the text in those ads was in English. English was especially used for advertising products that can be associated with modernity. Our results regarding the amount of English used and the position of English in the ad do not completely corroborate those of other studies. This could indicate an increase in the use of English in product ads, but it could also be due to the fact that we applied a different research method than had been previously used. The countries we investigated differ considerably in the amount of English used. These differences shed new light on earlier theoretical studies that have compared European countries on the use and status of English.

Although English has been shown to be the most frequently used foreign language in product advertisements in countries where it is not the native language, little is known about its effects. This article examines the response to advertisements in English compared to the response to the same ad in the local language in Western Europe on members of the target group for which the ad was intended: 715 young, highly educated female consumers. The use of English in a product ad does not appear to have any impact on image and price of the product, but it does affect text comprehension: the meaning of almost 40% of the English phrases was not understood. These results were the same for all countries involved in the study, irrespective of whether the respondents' (self-) reported proficiency in English is high or low.

In multilingual advertising, a foreign language is often used for symbolic purposes. In non-French-speaking countries, for instance, French is said to be associated with charm and style. The assumption is that the associations carried by the foreign language are transferred to the product that is advertised. A product advertised using French would thus also be seen as charming and stylish. Although a number of suggestions have been made as to the associations evoked by particular foreign languages, it has never been tested what associations are actually evoked in the minds of consumers. In an experimental study, 78 Dutch respondents were asked to write down their associations with two advertisements for one product that were identical except for the foreign language in which they were written (French, German or Spanish). We investigated the kinds of associations evoked, the number of associations, their valence (positive, negative, neutral) and participants' appreciation of the foreign language advertisement. Results showed that the different languages evoked partly different associations, and that the valence of the associations, and not their number, affected participants' preference for the advertisement. Participants preferred the ad with the highest number of positive associations and the lowest number of negative associations.

Fruit for back translating the material and questionnaires. We also would like to thank Marieke de Mooij, Catherine Nickerson, two anonymous reviewers, the associate editor and the editor for their comments on an earlier version of our paper.

The VILLA project ("Varieties of Initial Learners in Language Acquisition: Controlled classroom input and elementary forms of linguistic organisation") studies the very first phases of the process of language acquisition and establishes a tight link between learners' achievements in different domains of linguistic knowledge and the input they received. Novice adult and child learners with five different native languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian) were exposed to fourteen hours of input in Polish that was provided in a communicative classroom setting. Whereas the exposure conditions and the content of the input were kept constant for all learner groups, the age of the learners and the amount of metalinguistic information provided was varied between groups. Acquisition of different target language properties (phonology, morpho-syntax, discourse-pragmatics) was observed longitudinally through a series of tasks and experiments repeated over time. The paper presents the methodological set-up of the project and summarizes first results.