Citation

Sim MPY, Lamb ME. Psychol. Crime Law 2013; 19(8): 649-660.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/1068316X.2012.719621

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The current study explored the linguistic profiles of children's statements about alleged sexual abuse, focusing on whether and how the truthfulness of children's disclosures might be affected by such motivational factors as age, gender, relationship to the suspect, abuse type, number of incidents and interview type. While some researchers have attempted to apply linguistic analyses to detect deception in children's accounts, the results have been unpromising and inconsistent. A crucial missing step is to understand more about the normative linguistic styles adopted by children when speaking about alleged sexual abuse. This study found that all examined motivational factors had some effect on the linguistic categories associated with deception. Age differences were the most robust, with children's total productivity and use of exclusive, motion and insight words varying by age. These results suggest caution should be exercised when using linguistic analyses to assess credibility in children's statements, in light of the group differences and possible effects of children's reluctance, cooperativeness and motivation.