Faking in progress: Can real-time comparisons of spoken and written language production processes discriminate between truthful and invented narrative accounts?

Description

This full paper examines how spoken and written production processes differ between truthful and invented narrative accounts in real-time. The underlying assumption is that more cognitive resources are required when speaking/writing invented narratives, resulting in, e.g., more and/or longer pauses, and revisions (Bott & Williams, 2019). This is supported by previous findings that pause behavior during language production increases in accordance with increased cognitive demands (Goldman Eisler, 1970; McCutchen, 2000). But inherent differences between modalities may also affect the processes: revisions in writing are invisible to a subsequent reader, but always present in a speaker–listener context. Thus, people can be expected to better “imitate” truthful accounts in speech than writing, which makes the comparison of spoken and written accounts highly relevant from a forensic perspective. Guiding research questions: How do planning and revision processes manifest in invented compared to truthful narrative accounts? How are these possible differences expressed in spoken versus written language production?

Data was collected in an online experiment with Swedish adult participants (n=38): written data (captured by keystroke logging) and spoken data (collected using Audacity, and then transcribed). Based on four elicitation videos depicting misdemeanors (e.g., stealing a bike) participants performed two written and two spoken accounts. For one account in each modality, they were asked to alter “who did it”. Presentation order was counterbalanced across modalities, films and truthful/invented accounts. Data was analyzed using corpus tools (CLAN; MacWhinney, 2000), and keystroke logging programs.

Initial results for writing indicate increased planning in invented as compared to truthful accounts, shown in increased pause proportion. Initial results for speaking show no differences between invented and truthful accounts, indicating that it may be easier to imitate truthful accounts in speech. More fine-grained analyses are needed to tease out the details of both the written and spoken accounts.


References
Bott, L., & Williams, E. (2019). Psycholinguistic approaches to lying and deception. In J. Meibauer (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Lying (pp. 71-82). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Goldman Eisler, F. (1970). Psycholinguistics; Experiments in Spontaneous Speech. Lingua: International Review of General Linguistics, 25, 152-164.
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. (Vol. 3rd Edition). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
McCutchen, D. (2000). Knowledge, Processing, and Working Memory: Implications for a Theory of Writing. Educational Psychologist, 35(1), 13-23. doi:10.1207/S15326985EP3501_3

Period	2023
Event title	BAAL 2023 (British Association for Applied Linguistics, 56th Annual Conference)
Event type	Conference
Location	York, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International