Differences in the comprehensibility of testimony : a comparative study of magistrate's credibility judgements, witnesses' ethnicity and court role

BIbliography: pages 203-215.Only limited research has been undertaken regarding the effects of extralegal variables on the verdicts of lower courts. Bennett and Feldman (1981) have demonstrated that the well-formedness of the semantic structure of testimony determines its credibility. It has been shown that the comprehensibility of narrative discourse (testimony) is a reliable indicator of its well-formedness (Thorndyke, 1977). This study aims to explore the relationships between comprehensibility (well-formedness) as a dependent variable, and magistrates' credibility judgements, the ethnicity of witnesses and their court roles as independent variables. Simple three way Anovas constituted the bulk of the statistical analyses