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.
No comments:
Post a Comment