Based on a true story? How to differentiate between invented and self-experienced narratives through comparing linguistic processes in speaking and writing.

How can we know if a story is true? The aim of this four-year project is to investigate if, and in that case how, recent discoveries of how linguistic processes unfold in real time during writing and speaking can identify potentially true narrative accounts.
Psychological and neurocognitive research has identified differences in accounts between truth-tellers and liars. However, we believe that this psycholinguistic contribution can add to the available tools. The underlying assumption is that planning and revision processes (manifested as pauses during speaking and writing, hesitations and repetitions during speaking, and revisions during writing) will be distributed differently between narrative accounts of self-experienced events and narrative accounts of invented events. The project is explorative, but some predictions are made based on previous research on language processes.