Interviewing young adolescent suspects: When to reveal incriminating information?

Recent research has demonstrated that the way in which interviewers reveal information/evidence to interviewees/suspects can produce noticeable differences between truthful and deceptive verbal statements. However, very little of this research has involved adolescents. In the present study, 12 to 14 year old adolescents were asked to commit (n = 26) or not to commit (n = 26) a mock crime, and at interview to deny involvement in this crime. Prior to interview some information about each adolescent’s behaviour was made available to the interviewer but this was not enough to enable determination of which had committed the crime. The interviewer revealed such information either at the beginning of the interview (the ‘traditional method’) or at the end of the interview (as pioneered by the ‘SUE’ technique) or gradually. The interviews were analysed for interviewees’ ‘evidence omissions’ and ‘statement-evidence contradictions’. As predicted, liars omitted more crime-related information/details and their statements were significantly more inconsistent with the information/evidence known to/disclosed by the interviewer. The timing of the interviewer’s evidence revelation had a significant effect on liars’ mentioning during their free recall of some of this information and on the total number of details mentioned in free recall

Adjective forms and functions in British English child-directed speech

Abstract Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds’ exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives in child-directed speech (CDS); and (ii) investigate how features of the input might scaffold adjective acquisition. In our novel corpus of UK English, adjectives occurred more frequently in prenominal than in postnominal (predicative) syntactic frames, though postnominal frames were more frequent for less-familiar adjectives. They occurred much more frequently with a descriptive than a contrastive function, especially for less-familiar adjectives. Our findings present a partial mismatch between the forms of adjectives found in real-world CDS and those forms that have been shown to be more useful for learning. We discuss implications for models of adjective acquisition and for clinical practice

Amateur versus professional: Does the recovery of forensic evidence differ depending on who assesses the crime scene?

Volume crime offences such as domestic burglary are commonly assessed for forensic opportunities by the first attending officer present at the scene. Conversely, less serious volume crime offences such as thefts from motor vehicles are very frequent and are routinely assessed for forensic opportunities by the victim talking to the police over the telephone. It is not clear whether this difference in attendance policy leads to differences in the types and quantity of forensic material recovered. The current study explored whether there was a benefit to evidence recovery for attended as opposed to non-attended assessments. Five hundred thefts from motor vehicles offences recorded by Northamptonshire Police (UK) between 14 January 2010 and 28 February 2011 were analysed; 250 were attended forensic assessments and 250 were non-attended assessments. Significant differences were found between the two scenarios, with attended assessments more likely to yield DNA, property and trace substance material. Conversely, fingerprints were more likely to be recovered at non-attended assessments. Despite the fruitful findings of the current study, future research would benefit from establishing the methods used by the first attending officer and forensic investigator when assessing and gathering evidence. Similarly, it is unclear whether these differences in forensic material are reflected in the identification of an offender and subsequently in the solving of the crime

The effect of face mask wearing on language processing and emotion recognition in young children

Face mask wearing was an important preventative strategy for the transmission of the COVID-19 virus. However, the effects that occluding the mouth and nose area with surgical masks could have on young children’s language processing and emotion recognition skills have received little investigation. To evaluate the possible effects, the current study recruited a sample of 74 children from the North West of England (aged 4–8 years). They completed two computer-based tasks with adults wearing or not wearing surgical face masks to assess (a) language processing skills and (b) emotion recognition ability. To control for individual differences, age, sex, receptive vocabulary, early reading skills, and parent-reported social–emotional competence were included in analyses. The findings from the study highlighted that although younger children were less accurate than older children, face masks did not significantly impair basic language processing ability. However, they had a significant effect on the children’s emotion recognition accuracy—with masked angry faces more easily recognized and masked happy and sad faces less easily recognized. Children’s age and social-emotional skills also played a role. The findings suggest that the effects of face masks should continue to be evaluated

Using virtual environments to investigate wayfinding in 8- to 12-year-olds and adults

Wayfinding is the ability to learn and recall a route through an environment. Theories of wayfinding suggest that for children to learn a route successfully, they must have repeated experience of it, but in this experiment we investigated whether children could learn a route after only a single experience of the route. A total of 80 participants from the United Kingdom in four groups of 20 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults were shown a route through a 12-turn maze in a virtual environment. At each junction, there was a unique object that could be used as a landmark. Participants were ‘‘walked” along the route just once (without any verbal prompts) and then were asked to retrace the route from the start without any help. Nearly three quarters of the 12-year-olds, half of the 10-year-olds, and a third of the 8-year-olds retraced the route without any errors the first time they traveled it on their own. This finding suggests that many young children can learn routes, even with as many as 12 turns, very quickly and without the need for repeated experience. The implications for theories of wayfinding that emphasize the need for extensive experience are discussed

Encouraging 5-year olds to attend to landmarks: a way to improve children's wayfinding strategies in a virtual environment

Wayfinding is defined as the ability to learn and remember a route through an environment. Previous researchers have shown that young children have difficulties remembering routes. However, very few researchers have considered how to improve young children’s wayfinding abilities. Therefore, we investigated ways to help children increase their wayfinding skills. In two studies, a total of 72 5-year olds were shown a route in a six turn maze in a virtual environment and were then asked to retrace this route by themselves. A unique landmark was positioned at each junction and each junction was made up of two paths: a correct path and an incorrect path. Two different strategies improved route learning performance. In Experiment 1, verbally labeling on-route junction landmarks during the first walk reduced the number of errors and the number of trials to reach a learning criterion when the children retraced the route. In Experiment 2, encouraging children to attend to on-route junction landmarks on the first walk reduced the number of errors when the route was retraced. This was the first study to show that very young children can be taught route learning skills. The implications of our results are discusse

The Impact of Shared Book Reading on Children’s Language Skills: A Meta-Analysis

Shared book reading is thought to have a positive impact on young children's language development, with shared reading interventions often run in an attempt to boost children's language skills. However, despite the volume of research in this area, a number of issues remain outstanding. The current meta-analysis explored whether shared reading interventions are equally effective (a) across a range of study designs; (b) across a range of different outcome variables; and (c) for children from different SES groups. It also explored the potentially moderating effects of intervention duration, child age, use of dialogic reading techniques, person delivering the intervention and mode of intervention delivery. Our results show that, while there is an effect of shared reading on language development, this effect is smaller than reported in previous meta-analyses (g‾  = 0.194, p = .002). They also show that this effect is moderated by the type of control group used and is negligible in studies with active control groups (g‾  = 0.028, p = .703). Finally, they show no significant effects of differences in outcome variable (ps ≥ .286), socio-economic status (p = .658), or any of our other potential moderators (ps ≥ .077), and non-significant effects for studies with follow-ups (g‾  = 0.139, p = .200). On the basis of these results, we make a number of recommendations for researchers and educators about the design and implementation of future shared reading interventions

Using virtual environments to investigate wayfinding in 8- to 12-year-olds and adults

Wayfinding is the ability to learn and recall a route through an environment. Theories of wayfinding suggest that for children to learn a route successfully, they must have repeated experience of it, but in this experiment we investigated whether children could learn a route after only a single experience of the route. A total of 80 participants from the United Kingdom in four groups of 20 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults were shown a route through a 12-turn maze in a virtual environment. At each junction, there was a unique object that could be used as a land- mark. Participants were ‘‘walked” along the route just once (with- out any verbal prompts) and then were asked to retrace the route from the start without any help. Nearly three quarters of the 12- year-olds, half of the 10-year-olds, and a third of the 8-year-olds retraced the route without any errors the first time they traveled it on their own. This finding suggests that many young children can learn routes, even with as many as 12 turns, very quickly and without the need for repeated experience. The implications for theories of wayfinding that emphasize the need for extensive experience are discussed

A comparative study of cognitive behavioural therapy and shared reading for chronic pain

The case for psychosocial interventions in relation to chronic pain, one of the most common health issues in contemporary healthcare, is well-established as a means of managing the emotional and psychological difficulties experienced by sufferers. Using mixed methods, this study compared a standard therapy for chronic pain, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), with a specific literature-based intervention, shared reading (SR) developed by national charity, The Reader. A 5-week CBT group and a 22-week SR group for patients with chronic pain ran in parallel, with CBT group members joining the SR group after the completion of CBT. In addition to self-report measures of positive and negative affect before and after each experience of the intervention, the 10 participants kept twice-daily (12- hourly) pain and emotion diaries. Qualitative data were gathered via literary-linguistic analysis of audio/video�recordings and transcriptions of the CBT and SR sessions and video-assisted individual qualitative interviews with participants. Qualitative evidence indicates SR’s potential as an alternative or long-term follow-up or adjunct to CBT in bringing into conscious awareness areas of emotional pain otherwise passively suffered by patients with chronic pain. In addition, quantitative analysis, albeit of limited pilot data, indicated possible improvements in mood/pain for up to 2 days following SR. Both findings lay the basis for future research involving a larger sample siz

The development of wayfinding abilities in children: Learning routes with and without landmarks

Young children experience wayfinding difficulties. A better understanding of the development of wayfinding abilities may inform strategies that can be used to improve these skills in children. The ability to learn and remember a route was assessed in 220 6-, 8-, and 10-year old children and adults. Participants were shown a route in a virtual environment, before they were asked to retrace this route until they had achieved two consecutive trials without error. The virtual environment contained (i) no landmarks (ii) landmarks or (iii) landmarks that were verbally labelled. Adults, 10-year-olds and most 8-year-olds learnt the route when landmarks were present, but not all the 6-year-olds were successful. All age groups of children improved when the landmarks were labelled. Children were much poorer when there were no landmarks. This is the first study to distinguish between route learning dependent on landmarks, and route learning without landmarks (i.e. dependent on directions)