An investigation of Singapore Chinese cues to deception in a mock criminal interrogation

• Main Author: Poon, Yun Xuan
• Other Authors: Stefanie Stadler
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Linguistics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/76550
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Extensive research has been done on the detection of deception - both within criminal contexts as well as in other low-stakes situations. However, studies conducted on cues to deception have yielded largely inconsistent findings. In addition, most of these studies were done in North American or British contexts, so little is known about the way that Singaporeans lie. This paper aims to examine the cues to deception exhibited by Singaporeans in a mock criminal interrogation with a focus on linguistic and paralinguistic cues. This study will focus on lies relevant to real-world criminal investigations, where the consequences of having low deception detection accuracy rates would be severe. Using methods of conversation analysis, it was revealed that low levels of personal involvement and a tendency to increase social distance between speakers were characteristic of the language of deception in Singapore. The findings of this paper suggest that analysis on cues to deception may benefit from a more qualitative approach, where motivations of the speaker are taken into account. This paper also showed the importance of having a baseline of an individual’s speech patterns, so the chances of wrongly identifying a speech habit as a cue to deception would be significantly lowered.