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Speech cues to deception in bilinguals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2020

Margarethe McDonald Open the ORCID record for Margarethe McDonald [Opens in a new window] ,
Elizabeth Mormer  and
Margarita Kaushanskaya
Margarethe McDonald*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Elizabeth Mormer
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Margarita Kaushanskaya
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison
*
*Corresponding author. Email: mlmcdonald3@wisc.edu
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Abstract

Acoustic cues to deception on a picture-naming task were analyzed in three groups of English speakers: monolinguals, bilinguals with English as their first language, and bilinguals with English as a second language. Results revealed that all participants had longer reaction times when generating falsehoods than when producing truths, and that the effect was more robust for English as a second language bilinguals than for the other two groups. Articulation rate was higher for all groups when producing lies. Mean fundamental frequency and intensity cues were not reliable cues to deception, but there was lower variance in both of these parameters when generating false versus true labels for all participants. Results suggest that naming latency was the only cue to deception that differed by language background. These findings broadly support the cognitive-load theory of deception, suggesting that a combination of producing deceptive speech and using a second language puts an extra load on the speaker.

Keywords

acoustic cuesbilingualismdeceptionsecond-language speakers
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 41 , Issue 5 , September 2020 , pp. 993 - 1015
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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