Short Research Assignment #2
Yiwei Shi
Tess Laidlaw COMM 2013 Section 2
Article of choice:
Blankenship, K. L., & Craig, T. Y. (2007). Language and persuasion: Tag questions as powerless speech or as interpreted in context. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(1), 112-118.

In this article, Kevin L. Blankenship
 and Traci Y. Craig are committed to find the functions of tag questions and how does it affect persuasion in different situations. They focus on the linguistic cues provided by the communicator. In the previous researches, people usually think that using tag questions makes the speech less credible and indicates that the speaker is not confident with what he/she is talking about. But Blankenship and Craig have different idea with it. The authors account for several different factors that affect tag questions’ functions including credibility, argument quality and language.

The authors carry out an investigation with hundred and fifty four introductory psychology students. They are asked to participate in a 2(Credibility: low versus high)×2(Language: no tag questions versus tag questions)×2(Argument Quality: weak versus strong) questionnaire. They will read some editorial and then complete the dependent measures. The questionnaires are used to collect the data of the participants’. The authors will get the means, standard deviations , ANOVA and so on to analyze.

After the questionnaire and the analysis, Blankenship and Craig come to an conclusion that tag questions affect persuasion differently in different situations. Under some circumstances, tag question can increase negative biased processing, but sometimes they will result in objective processing. Tag questions affect persuasion differently when used by high and low credibility sources. That is, credible sources who used tag questions paired with strong