Abstract
Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with a legal definition and a description of a crime in which the grammatical aspect of provocation and murder events were manipulated. Participants were asked to make a decision (first- vs. second-degree murder) and then indicate factors that impacted their decision. Findings suggest that legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but the most robust effects were limited to temporal dynamics (i.e., imperfective aspect results in more murder actions than perfective aspect), which may in turn influence other representational systems (i.e., number of murder actions positively predicts perceived intentionality). In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context. Together, the results suggest grammatical aspect has indirect influences on legal judgments to the extent that variability in aspect changes the features of the situation model that align with criteria for making legal judgments.
Highlights
Jurors are presented with at least two pieces of information that are the basis of the decision they make regarding the guilt of the defendant
Did participants use the legal definition during reasoning? As expected given the definition of first-degree murder, judgments of first-degree murder were significantly and positively correlated with judgments of intentionality, r(121) = .53, p
Did participants use the legal definition during reasoning? As can be seen in Table 2, all dimensions specified in the definition were significantly correlated with legal judgments and in the expected direction
Summary
Jurors are presented with at least two pieces of information that are the basis of the decision they make regarding the guilt of the defendant. The first includes a legal definition of a crime that was purportedly committed, which typically sets the constraints for making a legal decision about the case. The second includes descriptions of events that are to be considered by the jury with respect to whether or not a crime was committed. While many factors contribute to a final verdict, one should not overlook that the information gathered by jurors is often in the form of discourse. Recent evidence suggests that grammatical morphemes (e.g., tense, grammatical aspect) can bias how individuals mentally represent criminal activity and thereby possibly influence perceptions of the intentionality of a criminal action [1]. Grammatical morphemes could impact the perceived presence of dimensions specified in a legal definition
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