Perceptual instability in police interview records
Examining the effect of pauses and modality on people’s perceptions of an interviewee
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.24565Keywords:
police interviewing, human speech perception, transcription, pausing behaviourAbstract
This article examines whether the representation of linguistic features within transcripts and audio recordings of police interviews can influence people’s perceptions of the interviewee. We specifically examine the influence of the representation of pauses through an experimental methodology. Participants were presented with a police interview either in audio format or in one of a series of transcript formats and asked to make a series of judgements about the interviewee. We manipulated both the presence and representation of pauses within the audio and transcript stimuli to assess how this would influence perceptions. Results showed differences between perceptions of the interviewee in the audio and transcript conditions, and that different representations of pauses within transcripts created perceptual instability between participants. The findings illustrate that the presence and representation of linguistic features in transcripts can affect perceptual judgements. We argue this should be explicitly considered by those using transcripts within the legal system.
References
Allport, G. W. and Cantril, H. (1934) Judging personality from voice. Journal of Social Psychology 5(1): 37–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1934.9921582
Belin, P., Bestelmeyer, P. E., Latinus, M. and Watson, R. (2011) Understanding voice perception. British Journal of Psychology 102: 711–725. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02041.x
Braber, N., Smith, H., Wright, D., Hardy, A. and Robson, J. (2022) Assessing the specificity and accuracy of accent judgments by lay listeners. Language and Speech, 00238309221101560. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309221101560
Carlson, K. A. and Russo, J. E. (2001) Biased interpretation of evidence by mock jurors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 7(2): 91. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-898x.7.2.91
Coupland, N. and Bishop, H. (2007) Ideologised values for British accents. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(1): 74–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00311.x
Deamer, F., Richardson, E. and Haworth, K. (2022) For the record: exploring variability in interpretations of police investigative interviews. Language and Law/Linguagem e Direito. https://doi.org/10.21747/21833745/lanlaw/9_1a2
Dixon, J. A. and Mahoney, B. (2004). The effect of accent evaluation and evidence on a suspect’s perceived guilt and criminality. Journal of Social Psychology 144(1): 63–73. https://doi.org/10.3200/socp.144.1.63-73
Dixon, J. A., Mahoney, B. and Cocks, R. (2002) Accents of guilt? Effects of regional accent, race, and crime type on attributions of guilt. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 21(2): 162–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/02627x02021002004
Duez, D. (1982) Silent and non-silent pauses in three speech styles. Language and Speech 25(1): 11–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/002383098202500102
Duez, D. (1985) Perception of silent pauses in continuous speech. Language and speech 28(4): 377–389. https://doi.org/10.1177/002383098502800403
Ekman, P. (1992) An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion 6: 169–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939208411068
Erickson, B., Lind, E. A., Johnson, B. C. and O’Barr, W. M. (1978) Speech style and impression formation in a court setting: the effects of ‘powerful’ and ‘powerless’ speech. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 14(3): 266–279. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(78)90015-x
Fox Tree, J. E. (2002) Interpreting pauses and ums at turn exchanges. Discourse Processes 34(1): 37–55. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326950dp3401_2
Fraser, H. (2020) Forensic transcription: the case for transcription as a dedicated branch of linguistic science. In M. Coulthard, A. May and R. Sousa-Silva (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics 416–431. Abingdon: Routledge.
Fraser, H. (2022) A framework for deciding how to create and evaluate transcripts for forensic and other purposes. Frontiers in Communication 7: 898410. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2022.898410
Giles, H. (1970) Evaluative reactions to accents. Educational Review 22: 211–227. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013191700220301
Haworth, K. (2018) Tapes, transcripts and trials: the routine contamination of police interview evidence. International Journal of Evidence and Proof 22(4): 428–450. https://doi.org/10.1177/1365712718798656
Hepburn, A. and Bolden, G. B. (2013) The conversation analytic approach to transcription. In J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (eds) The Handbook of Conversation Analysis 57–76. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Jefferson, G. (2004) Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In G. H. Lerner (ed.) Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation 13–31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
K.L.E.E. Photography. (2015) Becky Watts murder: 3rd police interview (long version). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN4fYTXObcg.
Kendall, T. (2007) Listening to silence: interpretation and transcription of pause in deposition. In M. T. Turell, M. Spassova and J. Cicres (eds) Proceedings of the Second European IAFL Conference on Forensic Linguistics / Language and the Law 323–332. Barcelona, Spain: IULA, Documenta Universitaria.
Kendall, T. (2013) Speech Rate, Pause and Sociolinguistic Variation: Studies in Corpus Sociophonetics. Dordrecht: Springer.
Komter, M. (2019). The suspect’s statement: Talk and text in the criminal process (Vol. 33). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laver, J. (1994). Principles of phonetics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Lundholm Fors, K. (2015) Production and Perception of Pauses in Speech. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg.
McAndrew, F. T. and De Jonge, C. R. (2011) Electronic person perception: what do we infer about people from the style of their e-mail messages? Social Psychological and Personality Science 2(4): 403–407. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550610393988
McDougall, K. and Duckworth, M. (2017) Profiling fluency: an analysis of individual variation in disfluencies in adult males. Speech Communication 95: 16–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2017.10.001
Mileva, M., Tompkinson, J. A., Watt, D. and Burton, A. M. (2018) Audiovisual integration in social evaluation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 44(1): 128–138. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000439
Murphy, N. A. (2007) Appearing smart: the impression management of intelligence, person perception accuracy, and behavior in social interaction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33(3): 325–339. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167206294871
Neil, G. J., Higham, P. A. and Fox, S. (2021) Can you trust what you hear? Concurrent misinformation affects recall memory and judgments of guilt. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 150(9): 1741. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001023
Ohala, J. J. (1984) An ethological perspective on common cross-language utilization of F0 of voice. Phonetica 41(1): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1159/000261706
Oosterhof, N. N. and Todorov, A. (2008) The functional basis of face evaluation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(32): 11087–11092. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0805664105
R Core Team (2022) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/
Richardson, E., Hamann, M., Tompkinson, J., Haworth, K. and Deamer, F. (2023, in press) Understanding the role of transcription in evidential consistency of police interview records in England and Wales. Language in Society.
Richardson, E., Haworth, K. and Deamer, F. (2022) For the record: questioning transcription processes in legal contexts. Applied Linguistics 43(4): 677–697. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amac005
Romero-Rivas, C., Morgan, C. and Collier, T. (2022) Accentism on trial: categorization/stereotyping and implicit biases predict harsher sentences for foreign-accented defendants. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 41(2): 191–208. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927x211022785
Tompkinson, J. (2018) Assessing the influence of phonetic variation on the perception of spoken threats. PhD thesis, University of York.
Tompkinson, J. and Watt, D. (2018) Assessing the abilities of phonetically untrained listeners to determine pitch and speaker accent in unfamiliar voices. Language and Law/Linguagem e Direito 5(1): 19–37.
Tsantani, M. S., Belin, P., Paterson, H. M. and McAleer, P. (2016) Low vocal pitch preference drives first impressions irrespective of context in male voices but not in female voices. Perception 45(8): 946–963. https://doi.org/10.1177/0301006616643675
Walker, A. G. (1986) Context, transcripts and appellate readers. Justice Quarterly 3(4): 409–427. https://doi.org/10.1080/07418828600089041
Watt, D., Kelly, S. and Llamas, C. (2013) Inference of threat from neutrally-worded utterances in familiar and unfamiliar languages. York Papers in Linguistics 13: 99–120.
Wennerstrom, A. and Siegel, A. F. (2003) Keeping the floor in multiparty conversations: intonation, syntax, and pause. Discourse Processes 36(2): 77–107. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326950dp3602_1
Willis, J. and Todorov, A. (2006) First impressions: making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science 17(7): 592–598. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01750.x
Zuckerman, M. and Driver, R. E. (1989) What sounds beautiful is good: the vocal attractiveness stereotype. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 13(2): 67–82. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00990791
