Null Results Repository

Keywords

Abstract

Psycholinguistics research has shown that individuals who are primed with a sentence that follows a particular syntactic construction use that same construction to describe an unrelated subsequent image. We tried to replicate this finding in a class of 20 undergraduate students by presenting the students with five pairs of sentences followed by unrelated images and asking them to describe the image.

Methods

We presented 20 students with 5 sets of short sentences that varied passive and active voice construction. Each sentence was followed by an image, pre-validated for clarity. Students were asked to describe the image, and the syntactic construction they used in their description (passive vs. active) was recorded. Students were not informed of the research goals until after the experiment.

Expected Outcome

Students will describe each image using the same syntactic construction with which they were primed more often than with the other.

Observed Outcome

The sentence structure in the priming sentence did not appear to be correlated with significant differences in sentence construction for the image descriptions averaged across students. As such, we failed to reject the null hypothesis.