On Forensic Linguists and Non-Experts Interpretation of Multimodal Texts

Abstract

The article presents intermediate results of an experimental research into psycholinguistic characteristics of understanding multimodal texts with extremist content. Forensic linguists specializing in extremism, well-informed and poorly informed in extremism discourse non-experts had to assess and comment upon multimodal texts. The peculiarities of interpretations have been established. The comprehension of sense in a multimodal text is constructed from established meanings of individual text components and detected semantic connections between them. Semantic and grammatical coordination of meanings of text components was the main mechanism of interpretation. The authors have performed the results of quantitative as well as qualitative analysis of experimental data using linguistic semantics methods. The indicators confirming the effectiveness of the expert assessment are given. The data presented confirm that forensic assessment of a multimodal text is influenced by presence or absence of both professional and general discourse knowledge. Both experts and non-experts have been proved to interpret multimodal texts using the semantic and grammatical coordination mechanisms. The correlation between these mechanisms and distorted text comprehension has been established. The factors of non-forced expert mistakes have been determined as excessive habit of interpretation, predominance of expert experience in assessment of materials of a particular discourse and priming effect. The results of the study can be used to develop science-based methods and recommendations on methodology of forensic analysis of extremist texts for experts.