Structural repetition in responses to indirect requests

Abstract

ABSTRACTWe 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. AcknowledgmentWe thank the many research assistants who assisted with these studies: Rebecca Applebaum, Samirah Artiste, Haley Barash, Mia Carter, Alathea Fairweather, Matthew Gomes, Karina Guenin, Alex Gutowski, Victoria Kolev, Elizabeth Lacy, Mollie Londot, Jordan Madsen, Jennifer Mast, Casey Oberdick, Maria Ribeiro-Siqueira, Kayla Sizemore, Lindsey Summerlin, Kristen Tinnerman, Jeremiah Townsend, Richard Valencia, Olivia Wentworth-Buchanan, Alyssa Westmoreland, Rachel White, Jordan Wiener, and Ashlyn Young.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. We analyzed the data with the following model: Dependent Variable ~ Question Type × Sentence + (1 + Question Type | Experimenter).2. Confidence intervals computed using the confint() function in R, based on the model specified in footnote 1.3. The designation “responded to the direct component of the indirect request” should only apply to the conventional and nonconventional indirect requests. However, there were a small number of cases where participants responded to What time do you close? (a direct request) by saying Sure! We close at 9 (or something similar). These were coded as “1” because the participant provided a yes or no answer before responding to the request for information (even though the question did not include a yes or no component).