Abstract:
Health warning labels play a critical role in making sure that people are aware of the risks of different products. As a result, the design of labels has received considerable attention, particularly for products with well-documented health risks, such as tobacco. Most of the literature has focused on the ratio of text to graphics, as well as the content of text. However, Lebanon is a country where most of the population is at least bilingual, meaning that different languages need to be accounted for in warning labels. It may be that having English in addition to Arabic text on warning labels would make for more effective labels, particularly for young people. At the same time, it is known that clutter – or having too much data within a certain area – can negatively affect the ability of people to process information. It could be that the addition of more text simply leads to more clutter. Thus, the overall goal of this study was to determine whether having bilingual text health warnings on tobacco packages (namely, Arabic and English), compared to using only one language, leads to better attention to and recall of warning label information. Three types of labels were tested: English only, Arabic only, and combined English and Arabic labels. Eye tracking was used to trace participants’ attention allocation and participants were asked to recall as many of the labels as they could immediately after the experiment as well as two weeks later. Results showed that having bilingual labels did not lead to better recall performance than having one language in both the short and long term, and Arabic labels generally led to better recall. Eye tracking data showed participants taking more time to extract data from bilingual labels and looking at them later in time than monolingual labels. Although participants believed that having bilingual warning labels are the best option, the results of this study warn against bilingual labels as a means of attracting more attention to their content.
