"They say" makes good liars: an investigation on evidentiality in language and deception

Aydın, Çağla and Arslan, Seçkin and Tanış Şapcı, Selma Berfin and Kalender, Şeyma and Güneş, Ayberk Kaan (2024) "They say" makes good liars: an investigation on evidentiality in language and deception. In: 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Rotterdam, Netherlands

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Abstract

A speaker’s use of language is one of the most important indicators in detecting deception. To date, however, little research has focused on grammatical cues used in deceitful statements. One such cue is evidentiality which is the grammatical encoding for the source of information; i.e., whether the speaker has direct or indirect access to what they assert. This study investigates whether and how evidentiality coding in Turkish, an evidential language, interacts with producing deceitful and truthful narratives. Deceptive retellings were notably longer and syntactically more complex compared to truthful counterparts. Our hypothesis of increased past forms in deception was confirmed, alongside a heightened use of direct evidential inflection (–DI) in deceptive conditions. This exploration sheds light on the nuanced relationship between grammatical evidentiality and deceptive language use.
Item Type: Papers in Conference Proceedings
Divisions: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences > Academic programs > Psychology
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Depositing User: Çağla Aydın
Date Deposited: 02 Oct 2024 15:47
Last Modified: 02 Oct 2024 15:47
URI: https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/id/eprint/50357

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