Prosodic Features of Lying: A View From Jordanian Colloquial Arabic

lying is an intentional act of delivering false information to deceive others using language. Examining the linguistic features of this act has been an area of interest for Forensic linguists because of its potential value in investigating various legal contexts such as allegations, testimonies, criminal investigations, and police interrogations. This study aims to explore the relationship between the frequency and duration of Filled pauses (FPs) and lying in Jordanian colloquial Arabic (JAC) and examines their social constraints. To achieve this aim, a corpus of 288 narratives,144 lying and 144 truthful, was collected through face-to-face interviews with 48 speakers stratified by gender, age, and educational attainment. The truthful accounts served as a baseline to detect any change in the pattern of FP frequency and duration in the lying condition. The results obtained from the analysis revealed that lying accounts contained more frequent and longer FPs than truthful accounts, indicating that the frequency of FPs and their duration are potential cues for deception in JAC. In addition, the data showed that the three social factors influence the frequency and duration of FPs when lying. In terms of gender, female deceptive accounts displayed a higher frequency of and longer pauses than males’. With regard to age, the lying narratives of old speakers had the highest frequency and longest FPs among all age groups. As for education, the deceptive narratives of high-educated speakers contained more frequent and longer pauses than their low-educated counterparts.