You’re Welcome or Not at All? Experimental Influencing Using of Un-verbs

Purpose of study is to verify that the type of teacher's instruction (affirmative or negative induction) affects pupils’ active vocabulary (incidence of negative verbs, i.e. verbs with the prefix ne-). Participants: 24 pupils, 9th grade (age 14-15). Procedure: during standard EDC/HRE lesson all students had the instruction to write essay on charity. Students were randomly divided into A and N group and were induced by 2 types of stimuli: a list with 14 positively formulated reasons Why people do charity (group A, affirmative induction) and a list of the same reasons but negatively formulated Why people are not doing charity (group N, negative induction). Thereafter essays were transcribed, lemmatized and coded. Totally 2351 words were used in essays (m=97.95 per essay). Results demonstrated that young students have in their active vocabulary higher proportion of negative verbs if they are induced by negatively formulated teacher's instructions (15% of all words), compared with students who were induced positively (9%). On the other hand this study proved that type of instruction influences cognitive processes and performance: positive induction lead to increase production of the text (1488 words used), while the negative induction led to inhibition of production (only 883 words used).