'Essentialist Beliefs about Language Learning'
(AsPredicted #75454)
Created: 09/24/2021 08:42 AM (PT)
This is an anonymized version of the pre-registration. It was created by the author(s) to use during peer-review.
A non-anonymized version (containing author names) should be made available by the authors when the work it supports is made public.
1) Have any data been collected for this study already?No, no data have been collected for this study yet.
2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study? Overall, we are interested in what might be related to essentialist beliefs about language acquisition. In particular, we ask:
Question 1: Are participants who are more essentialist about language acquisition more likely to endorse neuromyths regarding bilingualism and language learning?
Question 2: Are participants who are more essentialist about language acquisition more likely to oppose policies promoting bilingual education?
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. - Language essentialism: 1. Switched-at-birth scenario on accent, vocabulary, and grammar; 2. Language essentialism scale (3 subscales: learn a specific language, learn the first language, learn multiple languages)
- Neuromyths of bilingualism and language learning
- Bilingual education policy endorsement
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? All participants will go through the same questions.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. Question 1. Regression analysis: test whether essentialist beliefs predict neuromyth endorsement, controlling for level of education and bilingual learning history. This analysis serves as a replication of our previous data.
Question 2. Regression analysis: test whether essentialist beliefs predict bilingual policy endorsement, controlling for political orientation, level of education, and bilingual learning history.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. We will include participants who meet all of the following: 1. currently live in the United States; 2. pass all of the attention check items; 3. engage with the questionnaire for more than six minutes; 4. were born in and did receive a K-12 education in the US; 5. identify themselves as monolinguals.
7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size?
No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined. The pilot data showed strong correlations between essentialist beliefs and neuromyth and policy endorsement and therefore yielded a small ideal sample size in the power analysis (N = 59 for 95% power to detect both effects). We decided to collect N = 200 to match the sample sizes in previous studies.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register?
(e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) 
