Research Report – How textual priming can undermine legal safeguards intended to protect juries from misleading transcripts

The Hub had four presentations at the recent virtual IAFPA (International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics) conference – you can read a general summary about that conference in another blog post here.

This current post is all about research carried out by Dr. Yuko Kinoshita from the Australian National University, in collaboration with Helen Fraser from the Hub. The paper they gave is:

Kinoshita, Y. and H. Fraser How textual priming can undermine legal safeguards intended to protect juries from misleading transcripts.

(they also have a written version of this research, please see below the video for more detail).

This work presents new research about indistinct audio. Some people may be familiar with this audio, and what is purported to be in it, from some of Helen Fraser’s previous work. Before watching Yuko Kinoshita presenting this work just below, you could first experience the audio here (in the 1:36 video) – highly recommended so you will understand what participants were faced with.

The aims of this new research are two-fold:

  1. To Investigate the relationship between the listener’s confidence, perception, and priming.
  2. To produce tangible and digestible information which helps discussions on reform of the legal system around handling of indistinct speech evidence.

To see what Kinoshita & Fraser found in their new study, you can watch Yuko giving the IAFPA presentation in full in just below [20 minutes]. 

 

Fraser & Kinoshita (2021) publication

The associated written version of this paper which was recently published is:

Fraser, H., & Kinoshita, Y. (2021). Injustice arising from the unnoticed power of priming: How lawyers and even judges can be misled by unreliable transcripts of indistinct forensic audio. Criminal Law Journal, 45(3).

You can get in touch with Helen Fraser if you want to access a copy (see here for email address details).

Abstract of Fraser and Kinoshita (2021): Current law allows police transcripts to assist juries in understanding the content of indistinct forensic audio – with a number of legal safeguards intended to mitigate any risk that an inaccurate transcript might mislead the jury. The problem is that the safeguards rely on lawyers and judges gaining a sense of personal confidence that they hear words suggested by the transcript. The present article describes a new experiment showing that personal confidence is a poor indicator of perceptual accuracy, since listeners can be easily and unwittingly “primed” to hear words suggested by an inaccurate transcript. This confirms previous research suggesting current safeguards are inadequate, adds new findings regarding the effect of an alternative suggestion, and supports the need for an evidence-based process ensuring all indistinct forensic audio used in court is accompanied by a reliable transcript. It also indicates there is an urgent need to change legal procedures for admission of transcripts of indistinct forensic audio used as evidence in criminal trials.