Grammatical agentivity distinguishes remembered from imagined narratives: A preregistered replication in retold autobiographical memories

In an exploratory analysis of the Hippocorpus corpus (Sap et al., 2020, 2022), we found that recalled autobiographical narratives are grammatically more agentive than topic-matched imagined narratives: they show lower Linguistic Category Model (LCM) abstractness, a lower state-verb ratio, and higher first-person agentivity, while also carrying more passive-voice marking (all p < 10⁻⁶ in mixed-effects models across 2,572 topic-matched pairs). This exploratory finding, its full analysis pipeline, coding manual (inter-rater κ = .895) are available at https://osf.io/tgx4y. The present preregistration specifies a confirmatory replication of this effect in an independent contrast that was not examined in the exploratory analysis: retold vs. imagined narratives. The retold narratives are versions of the recalled stories rewritten by the original authors two to three months later. If the grammatical-agentivity signature of lived memory is robust, it should persist in retold accounts and distinguish them from imagined narratives on the same topics.