Study 4

The purpose of this study is to better understand the concept of being in a romantic relationship. In three prior studies (Study 1 and 2 conducted at Stony Brook University, Study 3 conducted at Champlain College), we gathered a list of features related to the experience of being in a romantic relationship, next a new sample of participants rated the centrality of each feature so that we could identify the prototypical vs. the non-prototypical features, and finally we found that prototypical attributes were more salient in memory than non-prototypical attributes. In the study we are currently proposing, we seek to examine whether prototypical effects would be evident in natural language use. More specifically, we predict that it would be considered inappropriate to preface prototypical but not non-prototypical features with hedges, such as sort of.

本研究旨在深入探究浪漫关系的概念。在前三项研究中（第一、二项研究分别由纽约州立大学石溪分校执行，第三项研究由查普兰学院执行），我们收集了与浪漫关系体验相关的特征列表，随后，我们针对新的样本参与者对每个特征的显著性进行了评估，以识别典型特征与非典型特征，最终发现典型属性在记忆中比非典型属性更为显著。在我们目前提出的这项研究中，我们旨在探究典型效应是否会在自然语言使用中体现。更为具体地，我们预测，在典型但非典型特征之前使用诸如‘某种程度上’之类的缓和语将是不恰当的。