ERIC Number: EJ1404233
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023
Pages: 21
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0163-853X
EISSN: EISSN-1532-6950
Available Date: N/A
Structural Repetition in Responses to Indirect Requests
Discourse Processes: A Multidisciplinary Journal, v60 n9 p634-654 2023
We report three experiments that assess whether structural priming in a question-answer dialogue context is affected by the use of direct requests, conventional indirect requests, and nonconventional indirect requests. In Experiments 1 and 2, experimenters made phone calls to businesses and asked either "Can you tell me (at) what time you close?" (conventional indirect request) or "May I ask you (at) what time you close?" (nonconventional indirect request). Structural priming was demonstrated by participants' greater tendency to produce a preposition in their response ("At 9" vs. "9 o'clock") when the question had a preposition than when it did not. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that priming is not statistically different across request types. In Experiment 3, we compared priming for the conventional indirect requests to priming for direct requests ("[At] what time do you close?"). Again, priming did not differ across question types. We conducted a final analysis that included data from all three experiments plus a large dataset collected using the same procedure. The larger analysis (n > 43,000) confirmed that priming did not differ across sentence types.
Descriptors: Questioning Techniques, Speech Communication, Language Patterns, Repetition, Priming, Phrase Structure, Context Effect, Inquiry
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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Data File: URL: https://osf.io/kvh3s/
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