Pauses in deceptive speech

Abstract

We use a corpus of spontaneous interview speech to investigate the relationship between the distributional and prosodic characteristics of silent and filled pauses and the intent of an interviewee to deceive an interviewer. Our data suggest that the use of pauses correlates more with truthful than with deceptive speech, and that prosodic features extracted from filled pauses themselves as well as features describing contextual prosodic information in the vicinity of filled pauses may facilitate the detection of deceit in speech.