Purpose: Previous research has established that lie-detection accuracy decreases with age; however, various mechanisms for this effect have yet to be explored, particularly when examining the detection of children’s lies. The present study investigated if younger and older adults detect...

Adults often fail to recognize the ambiguity of children’s unelaborated responses to ‘Do you know/remember (DYK/R) if/whether’ questions. Two studies examined whether sample questions and/or an explicit instruction would improve adults’ ability to recognize referential ambiguity in...

Children’s ability to adequately describe clothing placement is essential to evaluating their allegations of sexual abuse. Intermediate clothing placement (partially removed clothing) may be difficult for young children to describe, requiring more detailed explanations to indicate the location...

The verbs ask and tell can be used both epistemically, referring to the flow of information, or deontically, referring to obligations through polite requests or commands. Some researchers suggest that children’s understanding of deontic modals emerges earlier than their understanding of...

“Do you know” and “Do you remember” (DYK/R) questions explicitly ask whether one knows or remembers some information while implicitly asking for that information. This study examined how 104 4- to 9-year-old children testifying in child sexual abuse cases responded to DYK/R wh- and...

Previous research has examined young and middle-aged adults’ perceptions of child witnesses; however, no research to date has examined how potential older adult jurors may perceive a child witness. The present investigation examined younger (18–30 years, N = 100) and older adults’ (66–89...

This study examined the effects of secret instructions (distinguishing between good/bad secrets and encouraging disclosure of bad secrets) and yes/no questions (DID: “Did the toy break?” versus DYR: “Do you remember if the toy broke?”) on 262 4- to 9-year old maltreated and nonmaltreated...

Part II defines the relevance ratio and explains its relation to probabilistic reasoning. Part Ill uses the ratio to explore the ways in which physicians have misused the term "consistent with sexual abuse" in child abuse cases. Part IV considers whether symptoms "consistent with sexual abuse,"...

In this chapter we provide an overview of psychological issues involving children's capacities as witnesses. First, we discuss the kinds of cases in which children are usually involved. Across different courts, one most often sees children describing abuse at the hands of familiar adults....

This study examined relations between children's false statements and response latency, executive functioning, and truth-lie understanding in order to understand what underlies children's emerging ability to make false statements. A total of 158 (2- to 5-year-old) children earned prizes for...