Psycholinguistics: Techniques and Strategies Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics: Techniques and Strategies

Psycholinguistics refers to the study of language as it correlates to psychological makeup and behavior. The field of psycholinguistics has been in the limelight since 1979 when FBI began using the technique to identify potential criminals. (4) In many cases of criminal and civil nature, forensic scientists have used psycholinguistics to identify threats and patterns of threatening behavior etc.

The use of psycholinguistics has increased in the past 30 years and forensic scientists are now regularly employing a variety of psycholinguistic strategies and approaches to assess threat. Some of the most critical ways in which psycholinguistics can help the law enforcement include assessing threats in spoken words, identifying problems in writings, highlighting possible criminal behavior actual acts of violence and so on.

Research has indicated that words of a potential criminal or a criminal suspect can give clues to the person's race, gender, and age. This can help in narrowing down the list of suspects in various criminal cases. This has also helped in criminal profiling which is another very important part of our research. The best objective of adopting psycholinguistics is not only to narrow down the list of suspects but to also highlight false allegations and save innocent people from victimization. In some cases, it has been noticed that people who were considered possible suspects turned out to be completely innocent when some written material was examined for language use. In one case, two male were acquitted after writings revealed that writer was a female.

One of the strategies used by psycholinguists is focusing on sentence construction. This is also called statement analysis. This is where potential suspects are interviewed and their language use during the interview is later analyzed using a technique to see if they had been less than truthful. (Adams, 1996)

Workplace violence is another area which can get enormous help from the use of psycholinguists. Law enforcement officers often ask colleagues of a violent employee if the accused had ever used threatening language before committing an act of violence. In most cases, it has been discovered that violence in the workplace is not a sudden eruption. It takes place over a period of time as disgruntled employees get angrier every day and it finally culminates in a serious act of violence. But before the act occurs, the employee's language can provide sufficient clues to possible mental disturbance. The employee would say something like, "someday I am just going to shoot him and feed his body to the dogs." Now it must be noticed that there is a hint of serious anger and deep rooted frustration in the words. It's not the same thing like saying…"I so want to kill him" which many of us would say now and then when in a bad mood. But when the act is worded more explicitly, that's when psycholinguists would take notice and consider the person dangerous.