Pragmatic failure and referential ambiguity when attorneys ask child witnesses “do you know/remember” questions.

Why Do You Ask So Many Questions ?

[N]o amount of telling somebody in mere words that one is or is not angry is the same as what one might tell them by gesture or tone of voice .... Anyhow, it is all nonsense. I mean, the notion that language is made of words is all nonsense -and when I said that gestures could not be translated into "mere words/' I was talking nonsense, because there is no such thlng as "mere words" ... Gregory...

Attorney Questions Predict Jury-eligible Adult Assessments of Attorneys, Child Witnesses, and Defendant Guilt.

Children are often the primary source of evidence in maltreatment cases, particularly cases of child sexual abuse, and may be asked to testify in court. Although best-practice protocols for interviewing children suggest that interviewers ask open-ended questions to elicit detailed responses from children, during in-court testimony, attorneys tend to rely on closed-ended questions that elicit si...

Why do you ask? Good questions provoke informative answers

What makes a question useful? What makes an answer appropriate? In this paper, we formulate a family of increasingly sophisticated models of question-answer behavior within the Rational Speech Act framework. We compare these models based on three different pieces of evidence: first, we demonstrate how our answerer models capture a classic effect in psycholinguistics showing that an answerer’s l...

Attorneys' Perceptions of Child Witnesses with Mental Retardation

Do I belong?: it depends on when you ask.

A feeling of belonging to an academic context is a critical determinant of academic achievement and persistence, particularly for students of color. Despite the fact that students of color are generally more susceptible to fluctuations in belonging uncertainty than White students, survey design can unintentionally mask this reality. We investigated whether context effects undermine the accurate...