• Cavaco, Afonso
• Vigário, Marina
• Pires, Carla
• Correia, Susana
• Costa, Márcia F. D.

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Mistakes involving medicine brand names may lead to serious medication errors and even patients’ death. We testedthe effect of medicine brand names shape – native vs. non-native spelling – in two groups of Portuguese speaking subjects: (i)pharmacy clients (older and less educated); (ii) graduate students (younger and more educated). We run a recognition task and animmediate recall task, testing three groups of names with: (1) non-native graphemes, (2) non-native grapho-/phonotactics, (3)native patterns. Results showed that names with non-native properties, especially non-native graphemes, were recalledsignificantly worse. Non-native patterns had a null effect in the recognition task, possibly due to a facilitating effect of theodd, non-native feature, compensating for the extra demand imposed by non-native patterns on processing. Less educated, olderparticipants consistently performed significantly worse than more educated, younger subjects across experiments. The resultssuggest the pertinence of adapting medicine names to the language of target users.</jats:p>

Topics

• experiment
• laser emission spectroscopy