AN INVESTIGATIONINTO LINGUISTIC CUES TO DECEPTIONFROM THE STATEMENTS MADE BY CHARACTERS IN THE AMERICAN CRIME DRAMA “LIE TO ME”

Abstract

This study examined the linguistic dimensions of deception emitted through statements made by characters in the American crime drama series “Lie to me”, using a combination of textual analysis tools in order to look for linguistic cues in deception detection. Data input were randomly selected from overall transcript of the series’ 48 episodes with total duration of 2,016 minutes. Three main instruments for text analysis included Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), Text Content Analysis Tool (TCAT), and Simple Concordance Program (SPC). LIWC was used to calculate data of self references social words, positive emotion words, negative emotion words, articles, big words (letters > 6 words). TCAT software returned statistics on total unique word, number of sentences, average sentence length and the derived Type-Token ratio. SPC was used to count frequency of concordance in deceitful statements. Pearson coefficients were calculated to study the correlation of pairs of linguistic dimensions. Results showed the most frequent correlation happened between self-references and social words, usually in a negative direction. This finding and some other findings stimulated the author to suggest alternative approach to special English courses related to International Criminal Studies in law enforcement training programs in Vietnam via the emerging computer-based methods of psychometric measurement in statement analysis research.