My guess is a lot of these studies don't replicate as well in Europe vs. US.
Road signs in the US are predominantly text: PED XING. ONE WAY. DO NOT PASS. Where the European equivalents are all pictograms. Europe needs to do it this way, because the countries are so small you'd expect German-speakers driving in France and vice-versa: French-only text signs would be criminal. Similarly, a French-speaker can navigate a German train station without understanding German writing.
Europeans are actually much more attuned to deriving meaning from pictograms than their American counterparts.