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Young Children's Difficulty with Indirect Speech Acts: Implications for Questioning Child Witnesses
Author(s) -
Evans Angela D.,
Stolzenberg Stacia N.,
Lee Kang,
Lyon Thomas D.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
behavioral sciences and the law
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.649
H-Index - 74
eISSN - 1099-0798
pISSN - 0735-3936
DOI - 10.1002/bsl.2142
Subject(s) - psychology , developmental psychology , human factors and ergonomics , indirect speech , control (management) , injury prevention , suicide prevention , poison control , social psychology , medicine , computer science , medical emergency , linguistics , philosophy , artificial intelligence
Prior research suggests that infelicitous choice of questions can significantly underestimate children's actual abilities, independently of suggestiveness. One possibly difficult question type is indirect speech acts such as “Do you know…” questions (DYK, e.g., “Do you know where it happened?”). These questions directly ask if respondents know, while indirectly asking what respondents know. If respondents answer “yes,” but fail to elaborate, they are either ignoring or failing to recognize the indirect question (known as pragmatic failure). Two studies examined the effect of indirect speech acts on maltreated and non‐maltreated 2‐ to 7‐year‐olds’ post‐event interview responses. Children were read a story and later interviewed using DYK and Wh‐ questions. Additionally, children completed a series of executive functioning tasks. Both studies revealed that using DYK questions increased the chances of pragmatic failure, particularly for younger children and those with lower inhibitory control skills. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.