The Application of Forensic Psycholinguistics Research

The professionals from both theory and practice fields in China have always been deepening their understanding of evidence. For instance, the wording differs from “there are six forms of evidence” in the 1979 Criminal Procedure Code and “there are seven forms of evidence” in the 1996 Criminal Procedure Code, which are considered a kind of close listing and thus ruling out the possibility of other forms of evidence, to “the evidence includes”, which appears in the 2012 Criminal Procedure Code and is deemed open to include evidence other than the eight forms listed in the stipulation as long as it gains sufficient justification with the development of science and technology. The evidence drawn from forensic psycholinguistics research falls in the potential range.

The polygraph technology, as a dominant form of forensic psychological tests, has attracted attention from both professionals and laypeople, for it seems the only way out of a forensic situation in which the parties involved have competing descriptions of the facts in the case. Unfortunately, the polygraph test results, subject to the influence of personnel, equipment and environment, can not assure a stable error rate, which makes it short of the Daubert Criteria and can not be accepted as evidence in the court. Nowadays, the polygraph technology primarily works in the investigation process.

We assume that the polygraph technology may function better to construct the evidence information, if integrated with discourse information analysis(Du, 2002,2007,2009,2010) based on the language in the judicial process and that is the aim of our lab.

 

References

DU Jinbang 2002. An overview of the research of forensic psycholinguistics [J]. Modern Foreign Languages (1).

DU Jinbang 2007. A study of the tree information structure of legal discourse [J]. Modern Foreign Languages (1).

DU Jinbang 2009. Information flow in discourse [J].  Journal of Foreign Languages (3).

DU Jinbang 2010. A study on legal facts constructed via courtroom dialogue [J]. Journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (2).