Title

Linguistic Correlates Of Self In Deceptive Oral Autobiographical Narratives

Keywords

Autobiographical; Coh-Metrix; Cohesion; Deception; Deceptive; Explicit action verbs; Linguistic; Narrative; Referential coherence; Self

Abstract

The current study collected orally-delivered autobiographical narratives from a sample of 44 undergraduate students. Participants were asked to produce both deceptive and non-deceptive versions of their narrative to two specific autobiographical question prompts while standing in front of a video camera. Narratives were then analyzed with Coh-Metrix software on 33 indices of linguistic cohesion. Following a Bonferroni correction for the large number of linguistic variables (p<002), results indicated that the deceptive narratives contained more explicit action verbs, less linguistic complexity, and less referential coherence (sentences being cohesive with each other). The results support a theory that, in deceptive narratives, there is greater narrative distance between the self that narrates and the self that is narrated about. This suggests that narrative selves are constituted not as autonomous selves, but are subject to processes (e.g., psychological, linguistic, social) that are likely operating on a subconscious level. © 2010 Elsevier Inc.

Publication Date

9-1-2011

Publication Title

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume

20

Issue

3

Number of Pages

547-555

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2010.10.001

Socpus ID

80051670113 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/80051670113

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