Cognitive Frames and Cultural Responses to AIDS Education Rodney H. Jones Department of English City University of Hong Kong enrodney@cityu.edu.hk Abstract Objectives: This study explores the effect of cultural/linguistic models of communication and human interaction on subjects’ perceptions of and responses to AIDS prevention television advertisements. Design: Controlled interviews with linguistic analysis of responses. Methods: Two subject groups, one consisting of Hong Kong Chinese university students and the other of Western university lecturers were asked to view and then describe a collection of Hong Kong AIDS awareness television commercials. Two hundred retellings from twenty subjects were collected, transcribed and then analyzed for the cognitive/linguistic “frames” subjects operated within in their responses using a methodology adapted from Tannen (1979, 1980, 1984). Results: Analysis revealed important differences in how the two groups approached the commercials. The Chinese students tended to see the commercials as stories, with most of their responses operating in the narrative frame in which they described, interpreted and judged the actions of characters. The Western teachers, on the other hand, saw the commercials as lectures, focusing on the information they contained, the technical aspects of the presentation, the possible intentions of the producers, and whether or not the ads were effective in conveying “facts”. The differences in focus led the two groups to take from the ads different messages and apply these messages to themselves in different ways. Conclusion: This preliminary study suggests that people from different speech communities might “read” AIDS prevention messages in different ways and that the design of culturally relevant AIDS education must take into account not just a community’s practices and presuppositions regarding sex, drug use, medicine and disease, but also their practices and presuppositions regarding language use. Introduction As the HIV pandemic continues its relentless spread across borders and across cultures, increasing attention has been paid by social scientists and AIDS educators to the role of language in the development of effective and ‘culturally sensitive’ AIDS education materials and programs for prevention and care. Most of the work to date, however, has conceptualized language along rather narrow semantic lines, focusing on such issues as native categories and classifications for sexual acts and sexual identities or on particular registers used for talking about risk behavior (for example, sexual slang) (Parker, Herdt and Carballo 1991). Mays (1992), for example, has examined how linguistic differences between how black and white gay men talk about sex and sexuality can affect the way they interpret information about AIDS risk reduction, and Parker (1990) has observed how members of different ‘sexual cultures’ in Brazil use different lables and lexicons to communicate about sexual activity. Other work applicable to the production of effective interventions and publicity campaigns has concentrated on the potential stigmatizing power of language (Plummer 1988) and metaphors (Sontag 1991) , a power which has prompted Callen (1990) to call AIDS “a linguistic battlefield” and Teichler (1980) to dub it “an epidemic of significication”. Language, however, goes far beyond signs and signifiers, far beyond concerns with what we “mean” and the particular words we use to express these meanings. It also encodes our relationships with the people we are communicating with, what we think we are doing when we are communicating, and a whole host of rules and expectation and ways of seeing the world. Scollons and Scollon (1995) define language as a system of rules of communication that groups follow composed of four primary elements: the dominant ideology or worldview at work within the group, the ways members are socialized into the discourse system, the set of preferred forms of discourse for different situations, and the rules of interaction, or face systems, participants abide by when communicating. Over the past twenty years, sociological and anthropological linguists have provided numerous examples of how conflicting cultural expectations regarding these larger elements of language use can lead to misunderstanding between members of different speech communities. Gumperz and Hymes (1972) and Gumperz (1977), for instance, have pointed out how, in interethnic communication, conflicting expectations regarding rules of interaction, prosody, and paralinguistic cues can lead participants to form negative judgements about speakers’ personalities, abilities and intentions. In their work with Athabaskan Indians,