Structural repetition in responses to indirect requests

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.