Adults' understanding of young children's testimony.

Abstract

In many legal settings, judges and jurors must gain an understanding of a crime solely on the basis of a child's testimony. In the present experiment, the authors examined adults' ability to understand young children's accounts of a past event. Adults were given a transcript of an interview with a 3- and a 6-year-old child. In addition, half of the adults were given a summary of the event (informed) and half were not (naive). All adults were asked to extract as many details as possible from the transcripts. Naive adults were also asked to write a paragraph summarizing what happened during the event. Overall, adults gleaned more information from transcripts of 6-year-olds than from transcripts of 3-year-olds. Furthermore, naive adults were more accurate than informed adults. The authors concluded that adults' ability to understand children's testimony increases as a function of the child's age and may be impaired rather than enhanced by additional sources of information.