Cognitive Processing Effort of Financial Budget Jargon and Its Effect on Public Participation in Homa Bay County

Abstract

Comprehension of financial jargon and how people participate in budget hearing process ultimately enhances communication and participation. If people fail to process financial jargon, it would be difficult to create awareness, build consensus, make informed decisions, resolve conflicts, and generate participation in processes of change and development. Scholars in accounting and finance recognize cognitive linguistics in terms of processing and evaluating the quality of financial communication and predicting market sentiments and security prices. In finance, the communicative dimension of financial interactions has been for long been underestimated. The financial world uses a peculiar language that may sound rather unfamiliar even to native speakers of English who are not accustomed to the domain and people in Homa Bay may not be an exception. The objectives of the study are to: Analyze financial budget jargon of Homa Bay County and how it affects communication in such texts, assess factors affecting processing effort of financial budget jargon of Homa Bay County and examine how processing effort of financial budget jargon affects public participation in Homa Bay County. Relevance Theory by Sperber and Wilson (2004) whose tenets are: Inference, implicated assumptions, explicated assumptions, cognitive and contextual assumptions has been applied in the study. The study used descriptive research design involving a mixed method paradigm. Descriptive design is a scientific method which involves observing and describing the behavior of a subject without influencing it in any way. The study area was Homa Bay County. The study population included 600 persons who were composed of participants invited for public budget hearing process. The unit of analysis of the study entailed a pragmatic analysis of processing effort. Purposive sampling was used to select 48 members of the public and an excerpt from 2018/2019 budget estimates text. Data collection techniques involved the use of questionnaires which were administered to 42 members who participated in budget hearing process and interviews that were conducted to 6 key respondents. A pilot study was done in Rongo Sub County which helped to ascertain reliability and validity of the research instruments. Data analysis was done both quantitatively in terms of total frequencies and percentages of linguistic items which pose processing difficulty as identified by respondents and presented by use of tables. The data was also presented qualitatively in relation to literature used, tenets of Relevance Theory and objectives of the study. The qualitative data was categorized into related themes and sub themes .Findings showed that between 35 to 40% of members of the public had difficulties in processing financial budget texts. Phrasal and clausal processing effort was cognitively more involving than lexical processing effort. Inference and context play a major role in processing effort. Although people attend public budget hearings, about35% were unable to contribute as expected due to linguistic processing challenges. The study is significant in applied linguistics specifically in financial communication which would enhance public participation. The study is also significant terms of relationship between processing effort and translation of financial texts, editing and language teaching and learning.