Recency Tendency: Responses to Forced-Choice Questions

The present study was conducted to investigate whether forced-choice questions would lead to any particular tendency in young children’s responses. Two experiments were conducted in which 3- to 5-year-olds children were shown a short animation and then were asked a set of two-option, forced-choice questions. Consistent findings were obtained: (i) Forced-choice questions influenced children’s responses; (ii) Children displayed a consistent ‘recency tendency.’ That is, they tended to choose the second option in forced-choice questions; (iii) This tendency grew weaker as children aged. The findings suggest that forced-choice questions carry some suggestibility load and can bias children’s responses

Shifting senses in lexical semantic development

Most words are associated with multiple senses. A DVD can be round (when describing a disc), and a DVD can be an hour long (when describing a movie), and in each case DVD means something different. The possible senses of a word are often predictable, and also constrained, as words cannot take just any meaning: for example, although a movie can be an hour long, it cannot sensibly be described as round (unlike a DVD). Learning the scope and limits of word meaning is vital for the comprehension of natural language, but poses a potentially difficult learnability problem for children. By testing what senses children are willing to assign to a variety of words, we demonstrate that, in comprehension, the problem is solved using a productive learning strategy. Children are perfectly capable of assigning different senses to a word; indeed they are essentially adult-like at assigning licensed meanings. But difficulties arise in determining which senses are assignable: children systematically overestimate the possible senses of a word, allowing meanings that adults rule unlicensed (e.g., taking round movie to refer to a disc). By contrast, this strategy does not extend to production, in which children use licensed, but not unlicensed, senses. Children’s productive comprehension strategy suggests an early emerging facility for using context in sense resolution (a difficult task for natural language processing algorithms), but leaves an intriguing question as to the mechanisms children use to learn a restricted, adult-like set of senses

Effective and Appropriate Communication with Children in Legal Proceedings According to Lawyers and Intermediaries

Following the Government’s commitment to improve protection for child witnesses in the Criminal Justice Act 1991,interviewing protocols have been developed to provide guidance on effective interviewing. Additionally, the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 intermediary special measure was provided in order to facilitate communication between child witnesses and ‘interviewers’ during the entire legal process. This article presents findings from a study that aimed to establish whether, over a decade later, there is accordance between intermediaries and lawyers about perceptions of appropriate communication in the context of investigative interviews and cross-examination of children. Participants (19 intermediaries and 12 lawyers) examined transcripts of a mock investigative interview and cross-examination of a child and noted which, if any, questions or phrases they perceived to be inappropriate, to state what was inappropriate and to suggest how these could be amended. Qualitative analysis showed that both groups demonstrated awareness of the emotional and developmental needs of the child but there was a lack of understanding of some aspects of the interviewing guidance, particularly in respect to the definition of leading questions, the use of recommended question formats and procedural aspects