Producing deceit: The impact of veracity during spoken and written language production

The purpose of this study is to examine processes such as pausing, repetitions and repairs/revisions during real-time language production in speaking and writing in truthful and deceitful narratives. Studies have found a correlation between pauses and cognitive load (Goldman Eisler, 1968; Matsuhashi, 1981), and lies are reported to be cognitively demanding (Suchotzki et al., 2017). In a 2x2 experimental study, native Swedish speakers truthfully and deceitfully re-told events from 4 short films in speaking/writing. Spoken accounts were audio recorded and transcribed, and written accounts were collected with keystroke logging. A linear mixed effects model showed that veracity alone did not significantly affect the number of pauses. However, in the spoken narratives, longer deceitful texts contained fewer filled pauses compared to truthful texts. In writing, deception influenced the number of pauses so that longer texts had fewer pauses, but when the texts took longer to write, there were more pauses in deceitful compared to truthful narratives. To conclude, this study shows that there is a complex interplay between pauses and other measures of task complexity that needs to be teased apart further. The results are relevant for applied uses, such as forensic linguistics, but also for how we form theories on spoken and written language production.

References
Goldman Eisler, F. (1968). Psycholinguistics; Experiments in Spontaneous Speech. In Lingua: International Review of General Linguistics (Vol. 25, pp. 152–164).
Matsuhashi, A. (1981). Pausing and Planning: The Tempo of Written Discourse Production. In Research in the Teaching of English (Vol. 15, Issue 2, pp. 113–134).
Suchotzki, K., Verschuere, B., Van Bockstaele, B., Ben-Shakhar, G., & Crombez, G. (2017). Lying takes time: A meta-analysis on reaction time measures of deception. In Psychological Bulletin (Vol. 143, Issue 4, pp. 428–453).