Eyes do not lie but words do

Abstract

Evidentiality encodes how a speaker has access to the information contained in his/her proposition. It has been shown that some ‘evidential language’ speakers make a deliberate choice of evidentials while telling lies (Aikhenvald 2004). In this study, we recruited 40 native speakers of Turkish, an ‘evidential language’, to judge statements with evidentials using an eye-movement-monitoring-during-reading study with an end-of-sentence deception detection task. The participants read sentences with four conditions, containing a direct or indirect evidential form either compatible or incompatible with the given information source. Our results show that the indirect evidential condition was detected as a lie more often than the direct evidential condition. Readers had the tendency to judge stimulus material with source-evidentiality mismatch to be untruthful. These findings were mirrored in the eye-movement data, as we found gaze duration to be longer at the critical verb region for indirect evidential and mismatch conditions.