How forensic linguists can solve crimes, detect hoaxes and much more

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In 2008, Melissa Lucio was sentenced to death for the murder of her two-year-old daughter in Texas. The sentence was postponed until 2022. Forensic linguist Robert Leonard, after analyzing the interrogation of Ms. Lucio and her partner, Mr. Alvarez, determined that techniques were used to induce false confessions. This and other evidence served to stop Lucio’s execution two days before it was due to take place.

How could Robert Leonard, a linguist, make such a determination? Forensic linguistics, which developed in the 1970s, uses linguistic techniques to investigate crimes, particularly those “where language-related data are part of the evidence . ”

In other words, as Sheila Queralt Estévez writes in Trapped by Language :

“It is responsible for analyzing language, whether written or oral, to adapt it as judicial evidence, for example, in a police process, in a private investigation or in a request from a judge.”

A branch of “applied” linguistics

Forensic linguistics is a discipline that emerged from applied linguistics, a science that emerged in the United States during World War II. It was a way of responding to the need to apply linguistic theory to rapid and effective methods for learning second languages, especially by the American army.

Other disciplines such as speech therapy, clinical linguistics, language planning, terminology, translation, computational linguistics and applied phonetics also derive from applied linguistics.

Forensic or legal?

It is curious that we speak of “forensic linguistics” instead of “legal linguistics”. The word “forensic”, in its third meaning in the Dictionary of the Spanish Language , refers to a forensic doctor: one “officially assigned to an investigating court to carry out expert practices specific to forensic medicine”.

In fact, in the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Legal Terms, “forensic” is defined as “relating to courts or lawyers.” For this reason, it has nothing to do with the most common association we give to that word in our minds, relating to corpses, as can be seen in film or television productions.

Linguistic evidence

Forensic linguistics collects objective evidence using spoken or written language and analyses it using in-depth knowledge of grammar, phonetics, discourse analysis or dialectology. Such evidence is considered linguistic evidence and may include letters, suicide notes, text messages, emails, conversations, audio notes, phone calls or police statements.

Its relevance is unquestionable, since thanks to this discipline it has been possible to determine the guilty party of a certain crime or to exonerate the accused. How?

Our way of speaking or writing gives the expert professional information about us such as age, sex or socio-educational level; in addition to what we call “paraverbal” features (intonation, speed or peculiar pronunciations) or the use of filler words, that is, the features that characterize the way of speaking of said subject.

What kind of details can be deduced?

From the field of forensic phonetics, the following actions are carried out :

  1. Create a speaker profile by extracting all the information from a recording: sex, age, dialectal variety or pathologies (in addition to the analysis of background sounds).
  2. Determine the authenticity of a recording, particularly whether the recording has been edited or manipulated.
  3. Transcribe and analyze the content of a recording.
  4. Develop identification parades in which a witness or victim must identify the accused’s voice from a variety of samples.
  5. Identify whether the recordings have been broadcast by the same speaker, based on a comparison between different speakers.

A forensic linguist has mastered the tools necessary to detect the origin of an individual by dialectal and regional traits or by his pronunciation. He can even determine the circumstances in which he emitted his message by phonological analysis of voice modulations, pauses or disfluencies (interruptions by the speaker of his own enunciation rhythm by means of repetitions, lengthenings or additions of sounds, blocks, etc.)

An example of the precision of a forensic linguist was the work carried out during the investigation of the kidnapping and murder of Anabel Segura , when the analysis of a voice recording detected words of Toledo origin and the culprits were located.

Detecting hoaxes through linguistics

Another issue that also concerns forensic linguistics is the detection of hoaxes or fake news. Some linguistic clues that reveal them are limited to:

  1. A simple syntactic structure (simple sentences or at most compound subordinate relative clauses): “Today in Spain they are mourning Raphael. Their great singer has passed away.”
  2. Frequent spelling mistakes, such as the absence of accents in: “The 26 dams that were demolished in Valencia between 2020 and 2024 are the cause of the catastrophe experienced that caused innumerable human and material losses .”
  3. Negative declarative mode: “Neither France, nor Germany nor the Netherlands have offered to help after the disasters of the Valencia flood.”
  4. Vocabulary about hate, sex or death: “Emilio Botín murdered by drug trafficker Jesús Samper, lover of his daughter Ana Patricia.”

From plagiarism to the adaptation of administrative language

Forensic linguistics is responsible for supervising interpreters’ translations during the judicial process. These are vital to the outcome of the case, since the interpreter must translate not only what the witness says verbally, but also the paraverbal and nonverbal information that emanates from his communication.

It also deals with issues such as academic, musical (for song lyrics) and literary plagiarism: thanks to the analysis of style, it is possible to detect whether a work belongs to one author, to several authors or whether it has been plagiarised in some part. In the advertising field, it analyses plagiarism of registered trademarks or patents, as well as possible ambiguities for the purposes of manipulation or deception.

Forensic linguists are also responsible for adapting administrative and judicial language so that it is easy for both the elderly and those with cognitive disabilities, as well as for the general population, as required since 2009 thanks to the Pathway project of the Inclusion Europe organization .

Author Bios: Incarnation Perez Garcia is a Member of the Spanish Language and Linguistics research group at the University of Murcia and Susana Ridao Rodrigo is a Professor in the Spanish Language Department (UAL) at the University of Almería

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