Revisiting Deception in Breonna Taylor’s Case: A Cognitive-Acoustic Approach

Abstract

The present paper proposes an eclectic model for examining the cognitive load involved in detecting deception that benefits from the acoustic dimension as an exercise in cognitive forensic linguistics. The corpus used is composed of the legal confession transcripts of the Breonna Taylor’s Case, a 26-year-old African-American woman worker who was shot dead by police officers in Louisville, Ky., in March 2020 during a crackdown on her apartment. The dataset comprises transcripts and recordings of the persons involved in the shooting event but have given unclear charges, and those accused of contributory negligence due to wanton misfiring. The data is analyzed based on the video interviews and reaction times (RT) as an application of the model proposed. The findings reveal that the episodes chosen and how they are analyzed exhibit that the modified ADCM along with the acoustic dimension provide a clear picture of cognitive load management in the course of constructing and producing lies.