Children’s (N = 48) and adults’ (N = 28) truthful and deceptive statements were compared using a linguistics-based computer software program. Children (4 to 7 years of age) and adults (18 to 25 years of age) participated in a mock courtroom experiment, in which they were asked to recount either a true or fabricated event. Testimonies were then analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Software (LIWC; Pennebaker et al. 2007). This software has been previously used to detect adults’ deceptive statements (e.g., Bond and Lee, 2005). To date, no research has used this method on children’s narratives, nor has this software been used to compare those narratives to adult counterparts. Markers generated through the LIWC program achieved detection rates of 72.40% for samples of both children’s and adults’ narratives combined. In contrast, adult laypersons’ (N = 48) detection rates, for the same narratives (i.e., both children and adults) were close to chance. More specifically, detection rates were above chance for truth (65.00%) and below chance for lies (45.00%). Thus, the linguistic profile provided through LIWC yielded greater accuracy for evaluating the veracity of children’s and adults’ narratives compared to adult laypersons’ detection accuracy. 1. Introduction In the last three decades, greater numbers of children have testified in court [1, 2], which has led to an increased interest in research on the reliability and credibility of child witnesses [3, 4]. To date child witness researchers have focused on children’s testimonial capacities, reliability, and suggestibility, as well as jurors’ perceptions and biases (e.g., [5–9]). Children are capable of giving highly accurate accounts and can make competent witnesses (e.g., [10, 11]). However, relatively few studies have focused on methods of assessing the truthfulness of child witness testimonies [12]. Children’s honesty is a debated issue in the justice system, as some have raised concerns that children may be easily coached in giving fabricated reports of abuse or in falsely recanting true allegations of abuse [13–16]. As children can be coached to tell false stories (e.g., [2, 17, 18]), research is needed to examine reliable methods for adults to accurately distinguish between children’s truthful and deceptive statements. The aim of the current study is to investigate the effectiveness of a computer-based software program, Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), in distinguishing children’s fabricated and truthful narratives. In addition, the computer-based analysis of child testimony was compared
References
[1]
G. M. Davis, “Coping with suggestion and deception in children’s accounts,” in The Detection of Deception in Forensic Contexts, P. A. Granhag and L. A. Stromwall, Eds., pp. 148–171, Cambridge University Press, England, UK, 2004.
[2]
V. Talwar, K. Lee, N. Bala, and R. C. L. Lindsay, “Children's lie-telling to conceal a parent's transgression: legal implications,” Law and Human Behavior, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 411–435, 2004.
[3]
N. Bala, K. Lee, R. C. L. Lindsay, and V. Talwar, “The competency of children to testify: psychological research informing canadian law reform,” International Journal of Children's Rights, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 53–77, 2010.
[4]
S. J. Ceci, S. Kulkofsky, J. Z. Klemfuss, C. D. Sweeney, and M. Bruck, “Unwarranted assumptions about children's testimonial accuracy,” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, vol. 3, pp. 311–328, 2007.
[5]
B. L. Bottoms and G. S. Goodman, “Perceptions of children's credibility in sexual assault cases,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 24, pp. 702–732, 1994.
[6]
S. J. Ceci and M. Bruck, “Suggestibility of the child witness: a historical review and synthesis,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 113, no. 3, pp. 403–439, 1993.
[7]
M. Bruck, S. J. Ceci, and H. Hembrooke, “Reliability and credibility of young children's reports: from research to policy and practice,” American Psychologist, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 136–151, 1998.
[8]
M. R. McCauley and J. F. Parker, “When will a child be believed? The impact of the victim's age and juror's gender on children's credibility and verdict in a sexual-abuse case,” Child Abuse and Neglect, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 523–539, 2001.
[9]
D. F. Ross, D. Dunning, M. P. Toglia, and S. J. Ceci, “The child in the Eyes of the jury. Assessing mock jurors' perceptions of the child witness,” Law and Human Behavior, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 5–23, 1990.
[10]
M. Bruck and S. J. Ceci, “The suggestibility of children's memory,” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 50, pp. 419–439, 1999.
[11]
J. A. Quas, G. S. Goodman, S. Ghetti, and A. D. Redlich, “Questioning the child witness: what can we conclude from the research thus far?” Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 223–249, 2000.
[12]
M. C. Tye, S. L. Amato, C. R. Honts, M. K. Kevitt, and D. Peters, “The willingness of children to lie and the assessment of credibility in an ecologically relevant laboratory setting,” Applied Developmental Science, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 92–109, 1999.
[13]
N. Bala and J. Schuman, “Allegations of sexual abuse when parents have separated,” Canadian Family Law Quarterly, vol. 17, pp. 191–243, 1999.
[14]
M. Brennan, “The battle for credibility-themes in the cross examination of child victim witnesses,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 51–73, 1994.
[15]
P. Ekman, “The argument and evidence about universals in facial expressions of emotion,” in Handbook of Social Psychophysiology, H. Wagner and A. Manstead, Eds., John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK, 1989.
[16]
J. J. Haugaard and N. D. Reppucci, “Children and the truth,” in Cognitive and Social Factors in Early Deception, S. J. Ceci, M. D. Leichtman, and M. E. Putnick, Eds., pp. 29–45, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, USA, 1992.
[17]
T. D. Lyon, L. C. Malloy, J. A. Quas, and V. A. Talwar, “Coaching, truth induction, and young maltreated children's false allegations and false denials,” Child Development, vol. 79, no. 4, pp. 914–929, 2008.
[18]
H. K. Orcutt, G. S. Goodman, A. E. Tobey, J. M. Batterman-Faunce, and S. Thomas, “Detecting deception in children's testimony: factfinders' abilities to reach the truth in open court and closed-circuit trials,” Law and Human Behavior, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 339–372, 2001.
[19]
M. Lewis, C. Stanger, and M. W. Sullivan, “Deception in 3-year-olds,” Developmental Psychology, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 439–443, 1989.
[20]
V. Talwar and K. Lee, “Development of lying to conceal a transgression: children's control of expressive behaviour during verbal deception,” International Journal of Behavioral Development, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 436–444, 2002.
[21]
V. Talwar, S. M. Murphy, and K. Lee, “White lie-telling in children for politeness purposes,” International Journal of Behavioral Development, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 1–11, 2007.
[22]
A. Polak and P. L. Harris, “Deception by young children following noncompliance,” Developmental Psychology, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 561–568, 1999.
[23]
V. Talwar, H. M. Gordon, and K. Lee, “Lying in the elementary school years: verbal deception and its relation to second-order belief understanding,” Developmental Psychology, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 804–810, 2007.
[24]
V. Talwar and K. Lee, “Emergence of white-lie telling in children between 3 and 7 years of age,” Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 160–181, 2002.
[25]
V. Talwar and K. Lee, “Social and cognitive correlates of children's lying behavior,” Child Development, vol. 79, no. 4, pp. 866–881, 2008.
[26]
K. Chahal and T. Cassidy, “Deception and its detection in children: a study of adult accuracy,” Psychology, Crime and Law, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 237–245, 1995.
[27]
A.-M. Leach, V. Talwar, K. Lee, N. Bala, and R. C. L. Lindsay, ““Intuitive” lie detection of children's deception by law enforcement officials and university students,” Law and Human Behavior, vol. 28, no. 6, pp. 661–685, 2004.
[28]
L. H. Westcott, G. M. Davies, and R. B. Clifford, “Adults' perceptions of children's videotaped truthful and deceptive statements,” Children & Society, vol. 5, pp. 123–135, 1991.
[29]
L. A. Str？mwall and P. A. Granhag, “Children's repeated lies and truths: effects on adults' judgments and reality monitoring scores,” Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 345–356, 2005.
[30]
L. A. Str？mwall and P. A. Granhag, “Detecting deceit in Pairs of children,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 1285–1304, 2007.
[31]
A. Vrij, W. Kneller, and S. Mann, “The effect of informing liars about Criteria-Based Content Analysis on their ability to deceive CBCA-raters,” Legal and Criminological Psychology, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 57–70, 2000.
[32]
A. Vrij, “Criteria-based content analysis: a qualitative review of the first 37 studies,” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 3–41, 2005.
[33]
M. K. Johnson, S. Hashtroudi, and D. Stephen Lindsay, “Source monitoring,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 114, no. 1, pp. 3–28, 1993.
[34]
J. Masip, S. L. Sporer, E. Garrido, and C. Herrero, “The detection of deception with the reality monitoring approach: a review of the empirical evidence,” Psychology, Crime and Law, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 99–122, 2005.
[35]
G. S. Goodman and R. S. Reed, “Age differences in eyewitness testimony,” Law and Human Behavior, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 317–332, 1986.
[36]
A. Vrij, L. Akehurst, S. Soukara, and R. Bull, “Detecting deceit via analyses of verbal and nonverbal behavior in children and adults,” Human Communication Research, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 8–41, 2004.
[37]
L. Akehurst, R. Bull, A. Vrij, and G. K？hnken, “The effects of training professional groups and lay persons to use criteria-based content analysis to detect deception,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 18, no. 7, pp. 877–889, 2004.
[38]
S. L. Sporer, “The less travelled road to truth: verbal cues in deception detection in accounts of fabricated and self-experienced events,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 373–397, 1997.
[39]
G. D. Bond and A. Y. Lee, “Language of lies in prison: linguistic classification of prisoners' truthful and deceptive natural language,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 313–329, 2005.
[40]
M. L. Newman, J. W. Pennebaker, D. S. Berry, and J. M. Richards, “Lying words: predicting deception from linguistic styles,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 29, no. 5, pp. 665–675, 2003.
[41]
J. W. Pennebaker, M. E. Francis, and R. J. Booth, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC): LIWC, 2001, Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, USA, 2001.
[42]
E. Krackow, “Narratives distinguish experienced from imagined childhood events,” The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 123, no. 1, pp. 71–80, 2010.
[43]
J. W. Pennebaker, R. J. Booth, and M. E. Francis, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2007): A Text Analysis Program, LIWC.net, Austin, Tex, USA, 2007.
[44]
A. Vrij, S. Mann, S. Kristen, and R. P. Fisher, “Cues to deception and ability to detect lies as a function of police interview styles,” Law and Human Behavior, vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 499–518, 2007.
[45]
L. M. Knapp, P. R. Hart, and S. H. Dennis, “An exploration of deception as a communication construct,” Human Communication Research, vol. 1, pp. 15–29, 1974.
[46]
P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, USA, 1989.
[47]
A. Vrij, Detecting Lies and Deceit: The Psychology of Lying and Its Implications for Professional Practice, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK, 2000.
[48]
S. L. Sporer and B. Schwandt, “Paraverbal indicators of deception: a meta-analytic synthesis,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 421–446, 2006.
[49]
V. Talwar, K. Lee, N. Bala, and R. C. L. Lindsay, “Adults’ judgments of child witness credibility and veracity,” Law and Human Behavior, vol. 30, pp. 561–570, 2006.
[50]
N. Epley, C. K. Morewedge, and B. Keysar, “Perspective taking in children and adults: equivalent egocentrism but differential correction,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 40, no. 6, pp. 760–768, 2004.
[51]
J. H. Flavell, P. T. Botkin, C. L. Fry, J. C. Wright, and P. E. Jarvis, “The development of communication and role-taking skills in children,” 1968.
