In particular, evidence is provided in the research liter-
ature to suggest that the lies of younger preschool and
early-elementary-school children are easier to detect
than those of older children or adults. As children
become older, they have more muscular control and
may be better able to control and suppress nonverbal
behavioral cues to their deceit. In other types of
studies, however, observers have been found to be at
chance level at detecting even young children’s decep-
tion. Studies where young children’s deceit has been
detected have tended to use methodologies where
children were instructed to lie about an event. In
studies where children lied spontaneously, adult
observers were unable to detect even preschool
children’s deceit on the basis of their nonverbal expres-
sive behavior. In addition, studies that have placed
children in simulated courtroom settings have found
that mock jurors were unable to discriminate between
children’s truthful and fabricated reports. In those
studies, discriminating markers of children’s deception
compared with truth tellers may be masked by the
nature of these anxiety-provoking situations. Both
laypersons and professionals whose career is centered
on detecting deception (e.g., the police, customs offi-
cers, social workers, judges) have been found to have
difficulties distinguishing child truth tellers from lie
tellers. Therefore, in general, children’s deception in
naturalistic lie-telling situations is not easily detected
on the basis of their nonverbal behaviors.Children’s Verbal Deception Cues
By and large, research has found that adults may have
more success in analyzing children’s verbal cues than
their nonverbal cues of deception to detect a liar.
Studies that have examined children’s spontaneous lies
have found that below 8 years of age, children are
not very skilled at maintaining their lies in their sub-
sequent verbal statements. When asked follow-up
questions, children tend to reveal information that
implicates them in their deception. As a consequence,
studies have found that adults can detect young
children’s lies based on children’s inability to maintain
their lies in their verbal statements. As children
become older, in the later elementary school age years,
their ability to maintain their lies over extended verbal
interchanges and statements increases. As a result,
older children’s verbal deception is harder to detect
than younger children’s, and adults have difficulty dis-
tinguishing deceptive statements from truthful ones.The ability to verbally deceive may be related to the
increased cognitive load that is required to maintain a
lie beyond the initial verbal statement. This requires
assessing the knowledge of the lie recipient and strate-
gically adapting one’s message to be convincing while
simultaneously remembering what one has previously
said. Thus, it appears that with increased cognitive
sophistication, older children are better at maintaining
their lies by employing verbal-leakage control.
The most popular technique for measuring the
veracity of children’s verbal statements analyzes com-
ponents of speech content for certain discriminating
features. The Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA)
technique was designed to determine the credibility of
child sexual abuse reports. CBCA is a systematic
assessment technique using transcripts of children’s
reports. Coders indicate the presence or absence of
19 criteria assumed to be present in reports of actual
events. The method is based on the Undeutsch hypoth-
esis (formulated by the German psychologist Udo
Undeutsch) that a statement derived from memory of
an actual experience will differ in content and quality
from a statement based on the imagination. Field
research using CBCA assessment has found that
children’s truthful sexual abuse reports received higher
scores than those believed to be fabricated. Laboratory
studies using CBCA have also found differences
between lie and truth tellers. For instance, truth tellers
included more details in their reports than lie tellers.
Despite only small differences being found, and differ-
ences in the criteria that discriminated between
children’s true and false reports, CBCA studies
received higher accuracy rates at detecting true and
fabricated reports than nonverbal studies. Although in
general, accuracy rates vary for CBCA analysis, this
method has been found to be the most successful in
detecting children’s fabricated reports, with most of
the rates well above chance level.
There are several caveats of the CBCA technique,
especially for use with young children’s statements.
First, it is not clear if the CBCA can accurately dis-
criminate very young children’s true and fabricated
reports. Some criteria may not be included in very
young children’s fabricated reports owing to either
cognitive complexity or their having less command of
language, potentially making the reports of younger
children difficult to classify. Furthermore, using the
CBCA criteria, accounts of events familiar to the child
are more likely to be considered as true statements
than are accounts of events that are unfamiliar.214 ———Detection of Deception in ChildrenD-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:41 PM Page 214