JURORS' BELIEFS ABOUT THE INI ERPRETATION OF SPEAK ING STYLE

AN IMPORTANT QUESTION CONCERNING the application of linguistics to the law is whether linguists trained in conversational analysis meet the criteria for expert witnesses. Rule 702 of the U.S. Federal Rules of Evidence sanctions expert testimony that "will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue." However, both laypersons and judges commonly assume that expert testimony about conversations entered as evidence is unnecessary, since conversations are so familiar a part of our daily lives. Consequently, expert testimony about conversations is often excluded under Rule 403 as "a waste of time, or needless presentation of In a previous study (Di Paolo and Green 1988) we were concerned with the issue of whether or not expert testimony consisting of a conversational analysis by a linguist would significantly assist ajury by providing analysis and interpretation, or tools for analysis and interpretation, which the jury cannot reasonably be expected to come up with on its own. We examined this issue by comparing the inferences drawn by linguists from a transcript of a covertly recorded drug deal to those made by excused jurors. Our findings in that study show that even if jurors and linguists come to similar conclusions about the conversational goals of tape-recorded individuals, jurors do not draw the same inferences about the speakers' involvement in the tape-recorded event that the linguists do. On the basis of the conversation alone, the jurors in our experimental study judged the defendant to be guilty while the linguists believed him to be innocent. We should note that the linguists' conclusions were more in accord with the final verdict than those of the excused jurors, since in the actual trial the defendant was acquitted. That is, with additional evidence and counterevidence the actual jury in the trial decided that the defendant was not guility, but solely on the basis of the conversation, they might have declared him guilty. In this present study we test a hypothesis that may account for the previous results. The hypothesis is that the reason jurors may not draw the same inferences as linguists from conversational evidence is that certain kinds of evidence from the conversation which are viewed as very important by the linguists in making their decisions are dismissed by the jurors as