INTENSIFIERS AND HEDGES IN QUESTIONNAIRE ITEMS AND THE LEXICAL INVISIBILITY HYPOTHESIS

The wording of questionnaires has suddenly become a fashionable resear ch topic again, with the claim by Gaskell, Wright, and O'Muircheartaig h (1993) that respondents do not notice-and thus do not respond to-hig h-degree, or 'extreme', intensifiers in the majority of survey questio ns. This phenomenon is labelled The Lexical Invisibility Hypothesis. O ne of the major roles of intensifiers and their 'inverse', attenuating devices, or hedges, is to allow the questionnaire designer to control for social and psychological connotations. If Gaskell et al. are corr ect, hedges, as backgrounding devices, should be even less visible tha n intensifiers. The present paper takes the data from a small think-al oud study conducted at the University of York in 1993 and explores how nine randomly selected first-year undergraduates react to six 'extrem e' intensifiers (very, extremely, far, full, never, and consistently) and two hedges (seem and tend). The data suggest that (a) think-aloud data can within limits provide valid and linguistically rich evidence of attention to specific words, and (b) there is a need to distinguish between attending to a word and using it to formulate a response. The re is evidence that most of the intensifiers are attended to by half o r more of the subjects, but the hedges (apart from one example of seem ), along with never and consistently, do seem to be more 'invisible'.