Click download link to download full text.
Description: Law enforcement officers rely on the veracity of written statements from witnesses and suspects to determine guilt or innocence. This study examined the predictive value of grammar structures to differentiate truthful written narratives from deceptive written narratives in the English and Spanish languages. Experiment 1 examined three variables amongst English speakers: total word count, text bridge ratio, and spontaneous negation ratio. Experiment 2 replicated the methodology to assess the efficacy of the three variables in predicting veracity in the Spanish language. Participants in experiment 1 and experiment 2 watched a digital presentation of a person shoplifting an item from a convenience store and wrote truthful and deceptive narratives regarding the shoplifting event. The results of the study showed that deceptive narratives contained significantly fewer words, higher text bridge ratios, and higher spontaneous negation ratios than truthful narratives.
Suggested Citation:
DeCicco, A. J., & Schafer, J. R. (2015). Grammatical differences between truthful and deceptive narratives [Electronic Version]. Applied Psychology in Criminal Justice,
11(2), 75-92.
Keywords: detecting deception, deception, lie, truth, paralinguistic, written statements
Date: Jun 03, 2015 | File Size: 323.42 Kb | Downloads: 1605