Preregistration

In this tutorial, you’ll learn about the theoretical background behind preregistrations and preregister an experiment on the Open Science Foundation (OSF) platform.

Table of contents

1. Theoretical background
2. Create a project on OSF
3. Add a preregistration
4. Your task: Preregister the scalar inference strength experiment

Theoretical background

Download slides

Create a project on OSF

Before you can preregister an individual experiment, you’ll have to create a project on OSF. A project can have multiple preregistrations for different experiments (e.g., when you are conducting multiple experiments in one paper).

1. Go to https://osf.io and make sure that you are logged into your OSF account

2. Create a new project by clicking on the green button

3. Enter a title for your project and click “Create”.

Add a preregistration

1. In your project, click on “Regitration” in the top navigation.

2. Click on “New Registration” and select a template for the preregistration. In our experience, the preregistration template from AsPredicted.org is well-suited for many studies.

3. If you haven’t already specified the metadata of your project, provide a brief description of your overall project, choose a license, and specificy the field that this study falls into (e.g., Social Sciences - Linguistics) and click “Next”.

4. Answer the questions in the preregistration form and click “Review”.

5. Check your answers and finalize the pregistration by clicking “Register”. At this point the registration is final and can no longer be edited.

Your task: Preregister the scalar inference strength experiment

Follow the steps above to preregister the experiment that you implemented earlier.

For brainstorming potential hypotheses, consider the following two dependent variables:

• partitive: Some of the items include a partitive construction (e.g., “some of the cookies”)
• subjecthood: The some-NP can appear in subject position or in other positions in the sentence