The relation between investigative utterance types and the informativeness of child witnesses

Researchers have previously shown that, at least in Israeli investigative interviews, open-ended invitations yield significantly longer and more detailed responses from young witnesses than directive, leading, or suggestive utterances. Detailed psycholinguistic analyses of 45 interviews of 4- to 12-year-old children by police investigators in the United States confirmed that, as in Israel, invitations yielded longer and richer responses than more focused interviewer utterances. The superiority of invitations was greater when the children reported experiencing three or more, rather than only one, incidents of abuse. Invitations were rarely used, however, and the investigators failed to elicit more information from children who reported multiple incidents of abuse than from children who reported only one incident.