40 experimenters called ~1000 businesses each. They asked either *At/What time do you close?* When asked prepositional questions, participants used prepositions in their answers (i.e., *We close at 10, Around 10*).
This effect was first reported in Levelt and Kelter’s (1982) Experiment 3. We note that although there is a tendency for participants to produce more prepositional answers following prepositional questions, the effect reported by our various extensions and replications (Chia et al., 2019; 2020; Chia et al., under review; Chia & Kaschak, under review) is not always statistically reliable in individual experiments even though it is quite robust across experiments. One interesting feature of earlier experiments is the finding that different experimenters appear to elicit priming effects of different magnitudes.
As there were different sets of experimenters across the Chia et al. studies, it is possible that experimenter effects may explain the different effect sizes across experiments. In addition, the potential that individual experimenters elicit different priming effects is interesting on a broader theoretical level, as there is a long-standing question about whether individual speakers elicit more matching from their conversation partners than other speakers. The goal of this project will therefore be to establish whether there are genuine, reliable individual differences in the extent to which individual speakers elicit priming effects.
