Syntactic memory for print advertising

The present study investigates whether particular syntactic structures in print ads are recognized and recalled, whether syntactic simplicity can enhance memorability or, whether and how syntactic complexity can weaken and diminish it. The primary steps of this empirical study aimed to observe how the message is conveyed in a print advertisement and what types of grammatical sentences are used to best encode and transmit the information to the reader/consumer, be they simple, compound or complex sentences. By means of syntactic analysis, the study aimed to investigate what sentences in an ad are more likely to be remembered by the subjects involved.