Check out the register

For at least 80 years people have used the word register.  It is the word used to indicate that some words are commonly used and others are not.  People don't use words for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes people have rather restricted vocabulary banks.  That is usually a function of educational level, but not always.  Sometimes people have limited experience in a lot of different fields while others expose themselves to many different disciplines.   The more limited the experience, the more restricted the vocabulary.  Some people have decided that reading is tedious.  That results in having vocabulary disappear even if they have exposed themselves to words because of the principle, "Use it or lose it."  Reading regularly is a cause for an increased vocabulary, while limited reading yields a smaller number of words learned.  Sometimes people find themselves in a cycle of only associating with a certain group of people.  The words of the group are the words of use while other words are actually eschewed.  This happens with religious groups who have a closed approach on group admittance.  Of course, educational level is one of the greatest indicators of restricted vocabulary.

Since vocabulary choices are a function of various factors, one might think it would be impossible to use it in detecting deception.  Quite the contrary.  Lies have to look like the truth.  Thus, it is easy to assume that the vocabulary choices would be the same as for words of truth.  But, a principle higher in the hierarchy of choosing words is the principle of looking smart.  The idea is that if one appears smart/intelligent, then the listener more easily will view it as the truth.  That has the affect of changing register from usual one used by the person.

One of the most common word changes involving register is the opinion many people have of using verbal extensions, what some call phrasal verbs.  Verbal extensions are the use of adverbs mainly to extend or slightly modify the meaning of the verb being used, for example hand out for deliver or give, or figure out for discover or calculate.  The word out is an extension to the verb hand and figure and extends or slightly modifies the meaning of hand and figure.  Many see the verbal extension construction as ordinary or less formal.  To sound smart, people will revert to one word synonyms.  Examples abound: return for come back, accept for buy into, leave for check out, produce for put out.  The list is long.

When a person uses fewer verbal extensions than his or her usual habit, the person views the topic or environment one in which he or she needs to appear smarter.  So, the person makes a register change.  That is precisely the place where prevarication appears.  So, one has to figure out if the person has true knowledge of the topic or a good comfort level in the environment.  If not, perhaps a little deception is occurring.

What is meant?

Word choices are pretty important when speaking.  Early on in the second half of the 20th century, linguistics became a full-fledged discipline of study apart from psychology although before that time the two were indelibly linked.  One of the first matters of interest to explore was to find a universal grammar.  That ended up being a street that has branched many times as it has been explored.  But, the second matter of interest was a part of Noam Chomsky's work (the father of modern linguistics wrote a dissertation that spawned transformational grammar) that went unresearched and left for others to investigate, the area of semantics.  Now, of course, a number of good theories exist as to the nature and generation of meaning assigned to words.

Eventually, forensic linguistics would intersect with the study of semantics and produce tailored theories and methods for delineating between truth and deception.  Some of the first methods developed worked with word choices.  People usually think of vocabulary when mentioning word choices, and sometimes that is the case.  But, many times it has to do with the placement of adverbs in particular positions in a sentence or the type of conjugation of a verb.  The linguist working with detectives on the Susan Smith case a number of years ago, for instance, noticed that she spoke immediately following the drowning of her children in past tense.  Most people would have spoken in present tense since they would not have been used to the idea of their children being dead yet.

Because all words have assigned meanings to them by society, the choices people make can definitely be important.  In casual conversation, people don't really think too much about the words being spoken because they are speaking for the reason of merely communicating information.  But, when people think they are being evaluated, judged, or taken more seriously for some reason than casual conversation allows for, then they become much more aware of the words they are using and start making more particular choices.

The tricky part sometimes about evaluation of word choices is that society allows words to have double and triple meanings.  Deciphering meaning sometimes can be very context dependent.  An example from the famous DeLorean car case in New York illustrates this concept perfectly.  The person who broke the case  was told that if he did so, the defendant would kill him.  Sometimes, the word kill means to take a life, but it can also be used to metaphorically express anger without any action taking place.  Attorneys worked hard to show the context was a case of the latter, not the former meaning.  The defendant for this and other reasons was found innocent.

People say things all the time that they don't mean to follow through on.  So, eventually, everything boils down to words being figures of speech or literal in nature.  Once that hurdle is discovered, then the business of truth or deception can be taken up.

Word capture

People usually feel comfortable when talking to others they know.  Most personality types feel comfortable making conversation with people they don't know.  But when people feel out of their comfort zones, they try not to talk unless forced to.  When people get on elevators, they tend to clam up, not feeling the compunction to make even small talk with other occupants.

If someone has been accused and has to give a deposition for an attorney, if someone has to make a statement to a detective, or if someone has to talk in front of cameras unexpectedly, then the speech changes.  It is not a natural situation.  They are forced to talk.  That uneasiness is captured in words believe it or not.

The beauty of such captured words is that people cannot tell that their speech changes, it's so subtle.  It happens below the conscious level.  Unlike polygraph tests that measure nervousness and temperature rises, speech changes are so unapparent it can't be controlled even if the person knows what the changes are.  A person would have to know what changes about speech and practice it for a long time to fool the speech change test.

When a person begins speaking, and continues for any length of time, a comfort mechanism forces the language into a certain range of words being used.  The range is not a set range of words, but unique to each person's vocabulary base.  A quantity-based value for this range, called the type/token ratio, can be established.  The more and the longer one talks, the more the baseline of the ratio becomes certain.  A second statistical test performed on the range on various segments of his speech reveal the areas where misleading speech has been made.  Choices of vocabulary might be important to other types of analysis, but word choice semantics in the type/token ratio analysis are not important.

Such an analysis makes the 5th amendment an important principle if someone knows that a forensic linguist is in on a case.   Incrimination is the name of the game.

Following junctures

The word crafty comes from an Old English word meaning skilled.  By the time the Old English period slipped into the Middle English period shortly before the time of Chaucer in the 1300s, the word crafty began to be used as skilled in being deceptive. 

Part of the meaning for crafty is that someone designs the construction of the deception.  That idea lies at the heart of finding deception in speech.  People have to design their lies, so they have to decide at what point in a person's story it begins to vary from what actually happened.

The idea of design enables those who analyze discourse structure to know where to look in people's stories for their deceptions.  Stories have juncture points.  These are points where either the action ends or changes or points where a change in cast is introduced.  From one juncture to the next, one can judge the plausibility of the story happening the way it is told.  Some deception designers decide to change multiple junctures.  But, no matter how many junctures are changed, the story has to end in the same way as it was reported to the police or investigative team. 

That makes each juncture have a plausibility rating as the proceeds from one juncture to another.  A contributing factor to the rating is how well the action of the juncture supports or points to the reported ending.  These pointers are the markers that show an emerging design to the unknown parts of an occurrence.  A second contributing factor to the rating is the amount of detail offered in the juncture.  A person doesn't necessarily have to have too little or too much in this rating.  The person just has to have an equal amount of detail to the level the juncture starts.

The lower the rating of pointing or equality, the higher the probability that the section of the story is the point at which it varies from actuality.  Those who like to deceive are usually very good, but are they skilled, crafty enough, in controlling what lies under the surface of normal discourse?  The amount of practice that one would have to put in to recognize what to do to evade pointing and equality is something deceivers are not willing to give.

Science vs. hunches

Some people don't believe that forensic linguists can tell from words uttered when a person is being deceptive.  They point to the failures of other forensic methods from other disciplines such as eye movement, gestures and facial expressions, and sensors to measure temperature differences or tensal variation in the body.  Experts at telling non-truths can learn to beat any of the above investigative methods.

So what is different about the methods that measure the language used in lying?  People speak all the time to communicate their ideas.  In the first place, most people don't believe words can be turned into numbers or statistical data.  In the second place, language utterances reveal tendencies both in types of words used and in quantitative analysis.  It is virtually impossible to see either of the tendencies since the brain has been trained over a great number of years to produce those tendencies.  Even if someone could spot tendencies in words used and retrained their brains not to use them, nearly all people don't know the calculations to use statistically monitored words for tendencies.

One attorney I know called the linguistic method "voodoo," but he could not find fault with the method because he could not spot the tendencies in speech nor did he understand the statistical method used to find the patterns for analysis.  So, the voodoo became simply a reflection of his ineptness to manipulate language on more than a mere style or substance level as he was used to employing.

Different graphs can been constructed to measure several indicators of deceptive speech people use. Unfortunately, people are conditioned not to truly trust these investigative tools of science since the methods in the first paragraph have been found flawed or possible to beat.  That's too bad.  Many more people could have had their webs of deception exposed by forensic linguistic investigation than by hunches and stylistic/substantive guessing of words' surface values.

Word spinning

I have seen attorneys try to lead a witness without leading the witness according to examination rules. Unexpectant people play along unwittingly, and those who ultimately play along know that something is really wrong with line of questioning going on.

Usually, the attorney asks a few warmup questions to get the witness loose.  Then (s)he begins with "Would you agree that... ?"  No witness should answer yes or no to such a statement.  A witness should always say, "I would say..." and proceed to give her or his own version of what the attorney is referring to.  Sometimes a lawyer will try, "Would you characterize the situation as...?"  Again, the witness should give the answer, "I would characterize the situation as... " and proceed to recount his or her own characterization.

The most damaging kind of leading comes when an attorney phrases a question and asks for a simple yes or no answer.  There are two lines of response to follow if that happens.  The attorney wants to highlight the answer of course and not the context.  The first response should be to say something like, "Yes, I could answer yes or no, but the context is indelibly connected to the answer. "  Then begin with providing the context.  The attorney will probably interrupt the context to demand a yes or no answer.  The second response should be to say, "Because (the event) happened (a certain way), then yes (or no)."  If the attorney moves to strike the comment because it doesn't answer the question, or if the attorney reduces your second answer to a yes or no, then the second line of response is the only one left open - pleading the 5th amendment.

Reducing testimony to yes or no is really not the best way for an attorney to pin down a witness.  Establishing context is important, so an attorney needs to help the witness establish the context.  The jury hearing the testimony is just as likely to think less of the attorney pushing a witness to a fifth amendment answer as it is to think less of the witness.

One other advantage of allowing a witness to speak of characterizations or facts is that the words can be charted according to known linguistic methods of detecting deception.  Exploiting those areas then becomes much more factual and much less dependent on how an opposing attorney wants to cast a case.

What we know

One habit that detectives and attorneys have that leaves them blind to the truth is to ignore a very obvious principle.  Everyone knows that people speak more about matters they know than matters they don't know.  Duh, right?

But detectives and attorneys fail to ask for comments on all relevant topics.  As a result. matters a person knows versus matters a person doesn't know goes unknown.  That unknown information could prove to be damaging.  If a suspect or witness doesn't know much about something, then the topic is harmless. It would be the topics most known that need exploring and probing.  That will be where deception is taking place.

More generally, people new to a relationship should adopt the same philosophy.  A partner is less likely to exploit what he or she doesn't know, more likely to exploit what he or she knows a great deal about.  Being aware of the areas of someone else's knowledge base makes one aware not to open up without trusting the person or situation.  That limits the amount of damage a malicious soul (or uncaring) can inflict.

In legal matters, areas of knowledge are like enemies.  And as Michael Corleone has said, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer," (Godfather, Part II, 1974).  Areas of great knowledge unprobed are very dangerous.  A lot of truths, half-truths, hedges, and deception can take place in such vast unexplored areas.  It should always be the case for attorneys in depositions, voir dire, case presentation, and witness examination to explore all the areas of strength an individual has.  Therein lies the truth (and his or her deception) about a matter.

Glib talk

Glib talk can be innocent.  It happens all around and all the time.  People just say what comes to mind and it is mere chatting, many times to extend a friendly conversation.

But, I know some people that talk glibly as a matter of style and as a matter of business.  In this case, the glib talking is to lead people to believe something that could never be delivered on.  Many people are trusting and they are disappointed when the action promised is not delivered.

When glibness is a matter of style, I know to stay as far away from that person as I can.  They tend to be charismatic in personality, which complements their glib style.  So, recognizing this style is easy.  Most of the time their business is too good to be true.  That's a second flag in recognizing the glib talker.  This person doesn't see his or her talk as deceptive since he or she does it so often.

But, glib business style is deceptive.  And hurtful.  Very disappointing.  It wastes people's time.  Fortunately, these people also shrivel quickly when confronted.  Those who don't, need to beware.  Glib talk is the easiest kind of talk to analyze and illustrate how truth never resides in its words.

Hide and go seek

People hedge when they don't really want to give the heart of a story or set of events.  There are many reasons for hedging.  Sometimes, people are just private people and don't like others to know their business, such as their salary, their weight, their religious preferences or beliefs, their middle name, where they were born, and a host of other details about them.  They're just private.  They're not really hiding things.

Most of the time people are hiding things, though.  People hide when they have made a faux pas, when they have embarrassed themselves in some way, when they have seen or heard something they weren't supposed to see or hear, or when the timing of a happening is not to their advantage.  People hide things from everyone except certain people close to them sometimes.  But, people definitely hide things they have done that are wrong, either morally for them or illegally.

Psychologists, detectives, agents in espionage, and attorneys are groups of professionals that have studied how to crack the code on people who hide things.  They have developed techniques to try to bring out the event that is hidden.  Torture is the oldest technique, but a person doesn't ever really know if what is given up in torture is really the hidden event.  People give up hidden things merely to escape pain.

Three very popular techniques that have been around for decades and are still used are polygraph testing, reading gestures and eye movement, and highlighting hedges.  The first two are accurate to a small degree when used on people who haven't been subjected to them.  However, they are easily defeated by practiced people who hide events.  Hedges, on the other hand, take much more rehearsal for people to free themselves from because speech habits are hard to break.

The best known hedging word is the word well.  What follows that word is a thought carefully worded.  The utterance uh with a pause of .5 seconds or more is also a widely used feature of hiding something.  Other characteristic speech habits signaling a hedge are use of fillers like you know, I mean, you know what I mean, that was something, right, I'm telling you, so... (when drawn out or lengthened past normal timing of the following words).    Most of the time people use hedges to word something to follow that will divert attention or tell an innocuous portion of the event they are hiding. Hedges come in other forms as well.

It doesn't necessarily take an alert listener to hear or recognize a hedge.  But, it does take an astute person to know how to explore and probe the ideas, stories, or event hidden by the hedge.  The fun is just beginning for the forensic linguist or other intuitive professional or person who loves sliding back the curtain a little at a time after a hedge is used.  What is hidden is soon to be revealed.

Watching injustice

Last week I found myself in a courtroom for jury duty.  After they randomized my number for the jury pool I was to be in, I knew I was too far away from the number of jurors they needed even after the strikes and most likely after the people still trying to get excused.  So, I decided to mainly observe the lawyers during the voir dire.

The lawyer for the prosecution was a man of middle age.  His client was suing for damages for negligence.  The questions the attorney asked were the standard questions and aimed at the jurors who had had the experience asked for in the question.  That particular method is a gross waste of time, and doesn't really get anything to surface that he needed to hear.  People don't volunteer information if they think they want to be home in 2 hours and raising their hands prolongs their stay just that much longer.  The defense lawyer's method was efficient with time, but didn't garner the information she needed.  She used whole group questions, only receiving answers from a few prospective jurors who wanted to volunteer only enough information to salve their consciences.  Most of the time, she had to call jurors by name to get any answer at all.

The two lawyers' mannerisms were really predictable.  That doesn't garner a high degree of cooperation nor respect for the system everyone in the room was supposed to be upholding as a great way to judge others.  The defense lawyer unnecessarily broke the rules a couple of times, mustering an objection from the defense.  She showed a lot of inexperience in trying to break her way of thinking in redirecting questions to fit the rules.

The prospective jurors were also pretty typical in their responses.  Three of the pool decided they wanted to talk a lot.  There are different reasons for this, but mainly these prospects wanted to impress the defense attorney in particular how well qualified they were to judge this type of case.  6 others were factual in their responses.  That usually signals cooperation but the terseness of the facts really showed the opposite.  Then there were the 4 utterly silent ones.  Two of them paid attention to the proceedings, but two didn't.  Two of these people were picked as jurors on the case, which is a real mistake on the attorney's part.  It should be an attorney's rule never to have a person on his jury panel that he didn't make contact with during voir dire except in Federal court where the rules for voir dire are a little different than state rules.

Of course, I was dismissed after the voir dire.  I didn't follow up on the proceedings.  But, I could see how it was going to go.  50% of the jurors picked had actively identified with the plaintiff's attorney.  One more had reacted against the defense attorney.  One of the prospects that had not answered a question was one who had not been attentive during voir dire.  The other silent one had paid attention, but had seemed less involved with the defense attorney.  I would imagine it was a verdict for the plaintiff.

I am always brought back to some sobering news after reporting to jury selection duty.  People observe how we react even if we don't know they are watching.  That's not new news for me.  But it is always sobering news to me.  I need that reminder to keep me from becoming stagnant and complacent.