Applied Psycholinguistics 33 (2012), 83–95

doi:10.1017/S0142716411000117

Use of “um” in the deceptive speech

of a convicted murderer
GINA VILLAR
University of Sydney and Charles Sturt University

JOANNE ARCIULI
University of Sydney

DAVID MALLARD
Charles Sturt University

Received: November 10, 2009 Accepted for publication: July 11, 2010

ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE

Gina Villar, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Sydney, 75 East Street, Lidcombe, NSW 2141,
Australia. E-mail: gvil2424@uni.sydney.edu.au

ABSTRACT
Previous studies have demonstrated a link between language behaviors and deception; however, ques-
tions remain about the role of specific linguistic cues, especially in real-life high-stakes lies. This study
investigated use of the so-called filler, “um,” in externally verifiable truthful versus deceptive speech
of a convicted murderer. The data revealed significantly fewer instances of “um” in deceptive speech.
These results are in line with our recent study of “um” in laboratory elicited low-stakes lies. Rather
than constituting a filled pause or speech disfluency, “um” may have a lexical status similar to other
English words and may be under the strategic control of the speaker. In an attempt to successfully
deceive, humans may alter their speech, perhaps in order to avoid certain language behaviors that they
think might give them away.

It is widely accepted that lying produces systematic changes in behavior on the

part of the sender of the lie; however, people generally perform at chance or only
slightly above chance when attempting to distinguish between truthful and decep-
tive behavior in others (Bond & DePaulo, 2006). This level of performance extends
to those who routinely make veracity judgments as part of their professional role
(Vrij, 2004). It seems that people have a tendency to rely on cognitive heuris-
tics (Levine & McCornack, 2001), overestimate dispositional factors (O’Sullivan,
2003), overestimate nonverbal cues (Vrij, 2008), and generally attend to incorrect
cues (Akehurst, Köhnken, Vrij, & Bull, 1996; Mann, Vrij, & Bull, 2004). There-
fore, research efforts have focused on identifying objectively quantifiable cues
that discriminate between truth and deception, independent of the human observer
(Zhou, Burgoon, Nunamaker, & Twitchell, 2004).
© Cambridge University Press 2011 0142-7164/11 $15.00
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Language behaviors show great potential in this endeavor as they draw on

processes that have been associated with deception including working memory,
attention, motivation, and impression management (e.g., Burgoon & Floyd, 2000;
Zuckerman, DePaulo, & Rosenthal, 1981). In the current study we focused on one
language behavior in particular, the use of the so-called filler “um” in real-life
high-stakes lies. We analyzed the truthful and deceptive language of a convicted
murderer, Scott Peterson, by examining speech which he produced in two dif-
ferent contexts: when speaking with suspicious and unfamiliar person/s (formal
media interviews) and when speaking with a supposedly naive but familiar person
(personal telephone conversations with a mistress, Amber Frey). This study aug-
ments our recent study (Arciuli, Mallard, & Villar, 2010) where we examined the
discriminative ability of “um” in laboratory elicited low-stakes lies versus truth.

THE DISCRIMINATIVE UTILITY OF “UM”

As discussed by Arciuli et al. (2010), there are two possibilities regarding the
discriminative utility of “um.” One hypothesis predicts more frequent use of “um”
during deception when compared with truthful speech. The alternative hypothesis
predicts less frequent use of “um” during deceptive speech.
It has often been argued that utterances such as “um,” “ah,” and “mm” constitute
filled pauses (e.g., Maclay & Osgood, 1959) or errors that produce disfluent speech
(Chomsky, 1965; Goldman-Eisler, 1968). Disfluencies are ubiquitous in spoken
language and although there is substantial variation between individuals, there
is evidence to suggest that up to 6% of language may be considered disfluent
(Fox Tree, 1995). It has been suggested that the association between disfluency
and deception operates via increased arousal (i.e., in response to anxiety) and/or
cognitive load that often occurs during lying (e.g., Vrij, Edward, Roberts, & Bull,
2000). According to such a view, increased use of “um” during deceptive speech
does not reflect strategic processes on the part of the deceiver per se, but is a
byproduct of the increased emotional and cognitive effort associated with self-
regulatory behaviors during the construction and execution of a lie.
Alternatively, less frequent use of “um” in deceptive speech might reflect a
deliberate attempt to evade detection, particularly within the framework of in-
terpersonal communications. Certainly, there is a folk belief that instances of
“um” indicate production problems (Fox Tree, 2007) that are strongly associated
with deceptive behavior (DePaulo, Rosenthal, Rosenkrantz, & Green, 1982; Vrij,
Edward, & Bull, 2001); hence, deceivers may seek to control their use of these
utterances to improve credibility (Akehurst et al., 1996). Central to this hypothesis
is the view that liars are able to strategically monitor their deceptive behaviors in
an attempt to conceal “leakage” of cues (Johnson, Henkell, Simon, & Zhu, 2008).
Of relevance here is the claim that “um” may not be accurately conceptualized as
a speech disturbance but may instead have lexical status similar to other English
words (Clark & Fox Tree, 2002). Presumably, lexical status would enable a higher
degree of strategic control over the production of such utterances. It has been
demonstrated that speech content is easier to control than nonverbal behavior
during deception (DePaulo & Kirkendol, 1989). In studies unrelated to deception,
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speakers can and do successfully reduce their usage of “um” through conscious
control (Clark & Fox Tree, 2002; Kowal et al., 1997).

THE IMPORTANCE OF EXAMINING “UM” AS A

STAND-ALONE VARIABLE
Of importance, “um” and other types of utterances such as “uh” may serve diver-
gent communicative functions. For instance, Smith and Clark (1993) proposed that
“um” and “uh” differ from each other in the length of the delay they signal, perhaps
in order to better inform the listener of subsequent information. Specifically, “um”
signals a long delay and “uh” signals a short delay. Furthermore, “um” tends to
occur more frequently at the beginning of a sentence and is used more often when
additional delays are anticipated. Thus, despite the common perception that “um,”
“uh,” and other such utterances are interchangeable in that they serve the same
function, they may not be. In the deception literature, “um” has almost always
been operationalized in combination with other utterances such as “uh,” “er,” and
“mmh.”
In a study unrelated to deception, the work of Kasl and Mahl (1965) appears to be
the genesis for this particular taxonomy. In their study of the relationship between
speech hesitations and anxiety, Kasl and Mahl claimed that “um,” “eh,” and “er”
are variants of “ah.” They combined these utterances to form a single variable they
labeled “ah disturbances” (p. 426). In contrast, they labeled sentence changes,
repetitions, stutters, tongue slips, sentence incompletions, word omissions, and
incoherent sounds as “non-ah speech disturbances” (p. 430). In the deception
literature there are a number of references to this particular taxonomy and it
appears to have been widely applied in the investigation of speech disfluencies
and pauses (e.g., Bond, 2008; Bond, Kahler, & Paulicelli, 1984; DePaulo et al.,
1982; DePaulo et al., 2003; Kraut, 1978; Kraut & Poe, 1980; Riggio & Friedman,
1983; Vrij, Akehurst, Soukara, & Bull, 2004; Vrij et al., 2000; Vrij & Mann, 2001).
Consequently, the grouping of “ah,” “er,” “mmh,” and “um” together has been
routinely accepted in the deception literature and perpetuated from study to study.
However, during the past five decades the field of psycholinguistics has produced
some important findings regarding the role of so-called fillers such as “um.” As a
result, some of the assumptions in the work of Kasl and Mahl may benefit from
a reappraisal in light of this contemporary knowledge. We contend that grouping
“ah,” “er,” “mmh,” and “um” together may be obscuring the discriminative ability
of “um” where deceptive language is concerned.
To illustrate, consider three studies that have examined “um” in real-life high-
stakes lying (Davis, Markus, Walters, Vorus, & Connors, 2005; Mann, Vrij, & Bull,
2002; Vrij & Mann, 2001). Vrij and Mann (2001), in their study of a convicted
murderer who later confessed to the crime, found no significant difference in the
frequency of what they labeled “uh disturbances”: “frequency of saying ‘uh’ or
‘mmm’ between words” (p. 192). It is unclear whether “um” was also included as
an “uh disturbance.” In a subsequent study, in which Mann et al. (2002) examined
the verbal and nonverbal behavior of 16 suspects during police interviews, “um”
may have been included in a broader category labeled “speech disturbances”:
“frequency of saying ‘ah’ or ‘mmm,’ etc. between words, frequency of word
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and/or sentence repetition, sentence change, sentence incompletion, stutters etc.”

(p. 370). Mann et al. (2002) found no significant differences between lying and
truth telling on this variable. Similarly, Davis et al. (2005) grouped “um” with “uhs,
sighs, gutturals” (p. 691) under the heading of “nonlexical sounds.” This variable
was positively associated with truthful utterances. The authors suggested that the
discriminative ability of these “nonlexical sounds” may have emerged in this study
because, unlike previous studies, these sounds had been measured separately from
“other forms of speech disturbance” (p. 700), such as word/phrase repetition,
sentence incompletion, stutters and so on. They recommend that, in future studies,
“ums,” “uhs,” sighs, and gutturals be measured together as a separate variable
from other speech disturbances. We posit that “um” be measured independently.
To further illustrate, consider two frequently cited meta-analyses of cues to
deception (DePaulo et al., 2003; Sporer & Schwandt, 2006). In the first of these,
DePaulo et al. (2003) examined 14 studies to conclude that the “fluency” cate-
gory of “filled pauses” (defined as “utterances such as ‘ah,’ ‘um,’ ‘er,’ ‘uh,’ and
‘hmmm,’” p. 114) is not a reliable indicator of deception. However, several of
those studies did not specify whether “um” was included in their analysis (Bond
et al., 1985; Bond, Omar, Mahmoud, & Bonser, 1990; Cody, Lee, & Chao, 1989;
Hocking & Leathers, 1980; Riggio & Friedman, 1983; Vrij, 1995; Vrij & Heaven,
1999; Vrij & Winkel, 1990). Of the remaining studies that did specify the inclusion
of “um,” it formed part of a composite variable with other so-called fillers such as
“uh,” “er,” “mmh,” and occasionally with sighs, guttural sounds, false starts, and
the like (DePaulo et al., 1982; Feeley & deTurck, 1998; Knapp, Hart, & Dennis,
1974; Miller, DeTurck, & Kalbfleisch, 1983; Porter & Yuille, 1996). None of the
studies in this meta-analysis included a measure of “um” as a variable in its own
right.
In the second meta-analysis Sporer and Schwandt (2006) examined 35 studies
and quantitatively summarized the results of 121 estimates of so-called “paraver-
bal” cues to deception. These cues included filled and unfilled pauses, message
duration, number of words, pitch, repetitions, response latency, speech errors and
speech rate. In this meta-analysis, “um” was included in the category of “filled
pause,” along with “speech disturbances such as uh, er . . . ah, etc.” (p. 424).
Like DePaulo et al. (2003), Sporer and Schwandt concluded that filled pauses are
not reliable indicators of deception. However, only 5 of the 35 studies (DePaulo
et al., 1982; Ebesu & Miller, 1994; Knapp et al., 1974; Kraut, 1978; Vrij &
Winkel, 1991) examined filled pauses and none of these measured “um” as
a variable in its own right. Once again, the effects for “um” may have been
obscured.
A search of the deception literature between the years of 1994 and 2009,
using data-bases from a range of disciplines including psychology, linguistics,
and computer sciences, revealed that only two published studies (Arciuli et al.,
2010; Benus, Enos, Hirschber, & Shriberg, 2006) have measured “um” as a variable
separate from the others with which it is commonly grouped. The findings from our
laboratory based study, in addition to the findings of Benus et al. (2006), suggest
that when “um” is measured independently of other variables, its increased usage
is associated with truth relative to lies. However, both of these studies examined
only low-stakes lies. Because of the practical and ethical difficulties associated
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with investigating real-life high-stakes lies, few studies have been able to provide
comparative data to demonstrate that the same patterns of behavior are seen across
a variety of types of lies. Several authors have noted that cues to deception may be
moderated by how motivated the deceiver is to evade detection and it is possible
that the indicators of deceit that are observed in low-stakes lies will be different to
those observed in high-stakes lies (e.g., Burgoon & Floyd, 2000; DePaulo et al.,
2003; Hancock, Curry, Goorha, & Woodworth, 2008).
In summary, operationalizing “um” in combination with other variables may
obscure the discriminative utility of this variable. The present research was de-
signed as a companion study for our recent investigation of the use of “um” during
low-stakes lies, in order to further explore the discriminative ability of “um” in
the real-life high-stakes lies of a convicted murderer.

PREDICTIONS OF THE CURRENT STUDY

Because our recent research revealed significantly decreased use of “um” during
deception in laboratory elicited lies (Arciuli et al., 2010), we expected that “um”
might be observed less frequently in Peterson’s deceptive language, although it
was an open empirical question as to whether patterns seen in low-stakes lies
would also be seen in high-stakes lies. Given the ubiquitous nature of “um” in
everyday language, we predicted that any discriminative utility of “um” would be
apparent in both Peterson’s private telephone conversations with his mistress (i.e.,
the Frey Tapes) and his media interviews.

METHOD
Design
It is a nontrivial task to establish ground truth in research that is conducted
using real-life high-stakes lies that were elicited outside of the laboratory. In the
current study, in order to establish which stimuli are truthful and which were
not, determinations of veracity were not based on verdict. We instead included
only those utterances that could be firmly established as either truth or lie by
independent information.
First, it was necessary to separate the data into two subsets for separate analysis
(Frey Tapes and Media Interviews) because the production contexts may have
differed in several ways. For instance, it may be a more complex task to attempt
to successfully evade detection in the audiovisual modality (television interviews)
compared with the audio modality alone (taped phone calls). Specifically, on
television both verbal and nonverbal behavior is on display. Second, it is not
known whether Scott Peterson may have prepared more for the televised interviews
compared with the telephone conversations. There is some suggestion that Peterson
employed a media consultant to coach him in preparation for his public television
appearances. As a result, some of his responses may have been partially scripted
or rehearsed and, depending upon the questions Peterson anticipated being asked,
this may have impacted upon the cues to deception that were observed. Third,
the target of the deception (his mistress Amber Frey versus interviewer/millions
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of viewers) and the subsequent interpersonal use of language may have differed
between contexts. Fourth, the content differed somewhat between production
contexts.

Participant
We analyzed the speech of Scott Lee Peterson, a North American Caucasian
male with no prior convictions who was arrested in April 2003 for the murder of
his pregnant wife, Laci Peterson, who disappeared from their home in Modesto
California on Christmas Eve 2002. Peterson was subsequently charged, convicted,
and sentenced to death under the California Penal Code for the double murder of his
wife and their unborn son in 2004. Peterson was born in San Diego, California, on
October 24, 1972. English is his first language and his highest level of academic
achievement is a university degree in agricultural business. Prior to Peterson’s
arrest he was employed as a fertilizer salesman.

Case details
When Scott Peterson reported Laci Peterson missing on December 24, 2002, the
27-year-old was due to deliver her first child, to be named Conner, 6 weeks later.
Peterson was first interviewed by police on the day of Laci’s disappearance and
then on several further occasions as the search for Laci continued. Search warrants
had been issued on his home, vehicles, and place of business and he was under
police surveillance from early January 2003. Although Peterson told police in his
first interview that he was not involved with another woman, 6 days after Laci
was reported missing, a woman by the name of Amber Frey contacted police to
say she had been having a romantic relationship with Peterson for several weeks
since November 19, 2002. She claimed that during that time Peterson had lied to
her about his real circumstances by presenting the guise of a recently bereaved
widower living in Sacramento, who traveled routinely for business. Frey claims
she had only been told of his real identity on the day of her contact with police by
a friend who recognized Peterson from news reports.
Frey agreed to cooperate with police by secretly taping her telephone conver-
sations with Peterson from December 31 and he continued to call Frey following
the disappearance of his wife. During this time, Peterson repeatedly denied to
police that he had been having a relationship with a woman other than his wife,
even when he was eventually confronted with a photograph of Frey. At this point,
Peterson told Frey he had lied to her about his circumstances and confessed
to her about the search for his missing pregnant wife. Their affair became public
knowledge on January 24, 2003, when Frey made a statement at a news conference
orchestrated by the police. In response to the heated public response to Peterson’s
relationship with Frey, Peterson conducted four televised media interviews from
January 27–29, 2003, during which he was later found to have lied on at least one
occasion.
On April 18, 2003, Scott Peterson was arrested by police for the murders of his
wife and unborn child following the discovery of the bodies of Laci and Connor on
the shores of San Francisco Bay on March 12. The case went to trial in June 2004,
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where Peterson pled not guilty of the charges—5 months later the jury found him
guilty of murder in the first degree for his wife and murder in the second degree
for his unborn son.

Materials
Transcripts of four televised media interviews in which Peterson spoke about his
wife’s disappearance (each between 20- and 30-min duration) and approximately
11 hr of taped telephone conversations between Peterson and his mistress Amber
Frey (recorded over a period of 5 weeks), all of which were admitted as evidence at
trial, formed the data for this study. Peterson did not actually testify at his own trial,
so there were no samples of testimony speech data for examination. However, the
trial transcript itself was still required in the analysis for verification purposes: it
was used to isolate segments in Peterson’s speech that were subsequently identified
as truth or lie at trial.

Procedure
A single person coded the data using the procedures outlined in our earlier paper
(Arciuli et al., 2010). Prior to analysis of the speech data, each of the transcripts was
compared to the original audio of the interviews (where these were available) and
telephone conversations to ensure they were a complete and accurate record of the
interviews. Consistent with the methodology used by Vrij and Mann (2001), Mann
et al. (2002), and Davis et al. (2005), portions of each interview and telephone
conversation that could be verified as being truth or lie, were identified in the data.
This involved a meticulous reading of each of the media and wiretap transcripts
to isolate any utterances that could be strongly supported, by evidence presented
at trial or from another reputable source, as either truthful or deceptive. Deceptive
utterances were identified as those samples of speech where information was
manufactured, hidden, or manipulated.
Consistent with the methodology originally employed by Mann et al. (2002),
fragments were isolated so as to ensure any uncorroborated material or topic
changes were excluded. Consequently, fragments were of varying length and
independent of sentence structure to some extent. The majority of speech data
available in the interviews were discarded because there was no way of corrobo-
rating it as truth or lie. For instance, it is impossible to verify Peterson’s thoughts
or personal opinions. One example of this is when Peterson responds to a question
by the media interviewer Diane Sawyer who asked Peterson why his mistress,
Amber Frey, came forward to provide the police with information about their
relationship. Peterson responds, “It’s the appropriate thing to do. It really shows
what a person of character she is, um and it allows us to um get back to looking for
Laci.” Clearly, this segment must be discarded because we cannot know whether
this was Peterson’s true opinion.
Each sample was coded for the presence of the target variable “um” using
Wmatrix (Rayson, 2008), a Web-based interface tool for linguistic analysis of
English text that generates word frequency profiles from a concordance of each
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Table 1. Examples of deceptive and truthful utterances in each condition

Media Interviews Frey Tapes

Truthful utterance “They [Laci’s family] are
obviously um upset with me
about the um the romantic um
relationship with Amber um
and they have little trust as
they’ve expressed in the media
to date um but I believe that
they’re still looking for Laci.”
Deceptive utterance “It was a couple of days after
Laci’s disappearance, I
telephoned her [Amber] and
told her the truth.”
“Um well I’ll just I’ll just tell
you. Uh you haven’t been
watching the news
obviously. Um I have not
been travelling during the
last couple weeks. I have, I
have lied to you that I’ve
been travelling. The girl
I’m married to, her name is
Laci. She disappeared just
before Christmas.”
“I’ll call when it’s my night
time. About nine hours
difference. I’ll take the train
late tonight from here to
Brussels. And then I’ll be in
Brussels for at least four
days.”

sample. The presence of “um” in each of the four conditions was calculated as a
percentage of the total number of words per sample.

RESULTS
The sample sizes of each of the four conditions (measured as the total number
of words per condition) differed: 180 words for the media interviews/deception
condition, 690 words for the media interviews/truth condition, 840 words for the
Frey tapes/deception condition, and 1,018 words for the Frey tapes/truth condition.
Table 1 provides examples of speech from each condition.
To test the discriminative utility of “um,” word frequency profiles were gener-
ated for each sample and analysed using the log likelihood ratio (LR) test. LR in
the present study refers to the logarithm of the ratio between the likelihood that the
truthful and deceptive speech inputs from the participant have the same linguistic
profile and the likelihood that the linguistic profiles differ from each other. LR is
less likely to overestimate significance than traditional statistical tests such as z
ratios that rely upon assumptions of a normal distribution. Of particular relevance
to the present study, LR has the added benefit of being suitable for comparison of
texts of differing lengths (Dunning, 1993; Rayson, Berridge, & Francis, 2004).
The frequency of “um” as a percentage of the total number of words in each
of the four conditions, including confidence intervals as an indication of the true
range in which the effect is likely to occur, is shown in Table 2.
The critical value for LR (
) at an alpha level of .05 was calculated at 3.84. Log
linear comparisons of the presence of “um” revealed there was a significant main
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Table 2. Frequency of “um” as a function of veracity

Media Interviews Frey Tapes

Truth (CI) Deception (CI) Truth (CI) Deception (CI)

Percentage
of “um”s 5.22 (3.74, 6.70) 1.11 (0.41, 1.81) 3.93 (3.05, 4.81) 0.12 (0.00, 0.28)

Note: CI, 95% confidence interval.

effect of veracity, with lying accompanied by fewer “um”s (0.25%) compared to

during truth telling (7.45%;
= 108.89, df = 1, p = .000). The main effect of
speech production modality was not significant, with only marginally more “um”s
appearing during the media interviews (4.37%) than during the Frey tapes (4.25%)
(
= 0.02, df = 1, p = .89). There was no significant interaction between veracity
and speech production conditions (
= 0.10, df = 1, p = .75).

DISCUSSION
Humans are ineffective lie detectors. Thus, researchers have focused their attention
on identifying objective quantifiable cues to deception. There is a growing body of
evidence suggesting a link between language and deceptive behaviors (Newman,
Pennebaker, Berry, & Richards, 2003; Zhou et al., 2004), although questions
remain regarding the nature and role of particular linguistic cues, especially in
real-life high-stakes circumstances. We analyzed the use of “um” in the truthful
and deceptive speech of a convicted murderer in two different production contexts
(media interviews vs. personal telephone conversations).
There are two possibilities regarding the use of “um.” One hypothesis predicts
more frequent use of “um” during deceptive compared to truthful speech, possibly
in response to speech-planning problems associated with the additional emotional
and/or cognitive processing demands generated by lying (e.g., Vrij et al., 2000).
The alternative hypothesis predicts less frequent use of “um” during deceptive
speech, possibly because the sender attempts to strategically plan and monitor
the content of the message to prevent such interjections (e.g., Johnson et al.,
2008). The findings of the current study supported the latter hypothesis with “um”
observed less frequently in deceptive compared with truthful speech. This effect
was observed in both production contexts of informal telephone conversations
and more formal media interviews. Overall, these results are in line with our
recent study examining low-stakes laboratory elicited lies relative to truth (Arciuli
et al., 2010), which demonstrated that the increased use of “um” is negatively
associated with deception.
There is a folk belief that “um” is a marker of uncertainty and, particularly,
of deceptive behavior. Thus, its reduced usage during deceptive speech may in-
dicate that the speaker is attempting to control the frequency of “um” in order
to appear more credible. Data from the present study emphasize the strategic
nature of deceptive behavior. Furthermore, our findings suggest that rather than
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representing a speech error or disfluency, “um” may be more accurately viewed as

a word (such as an interjection), used thoughtfully and purposefully, and under the
strategic control of the speaker. It would be valuable for future studies to consider
whether “um” should indeed be (re)conceptualized as a lexical term, with all the
accompanying lexical properties of phonology, prosody, syntax, semantics, and
pragmatics.
Note that the effects observed here, although striking from a statistical view-
point, are rather subtle from the perspective of the human observer. However, “um”
offers the key advantage of being well suited to automatic parsing of transcribed
speech (as just like any other word “um” can be identified and counted using
basic concordance systems). Thus, once transcribed, “um” can be systematically
and objectively identified and tracked, for later comparison with baseline speech
samples from the same individual.
There are some limitations associated with the current study that are specific to
the case itself, and also speak to the methodological challenges implicit in research
on real-life lies. Within the media interviews, it is unclear whether there were any
practice effects from interview to interview; however, there is research to suggest
that contrary to commonly held beliefs by forensic investigators, verbal cues
to deception may remain fairly stable over repeated interrogations (Granhag &
Strömwall, 2002). In addition, there are temporal issues to consider in this data—
the telephone conversation speech data span a 4-week period and the interview data
span a 2-day period. Last, it is acknowledged that a single-case design has some
disadvantages, namely, in terms of generalizability to other persons. However, the
current research is intended as a companion study for our recent laboratory study
(Arciuli et al., 2010). Moreover, reporting on case studies is a long and well-
accepted tradition, a method that provides rich contextual information, which may
otherwise be obscured in large group comparison designs (Yin, 2003). Important
findings have emerged in psycholinguistics using this methodology (e.g., the
seminal work of Garrard, Maloney, Hodges, & Patterson, 2005, that revealed
linguistic markers of cognitive decline in dementia). Case studies such as the
present one provide the unique opportunity to investigate real-life high-stakes
lies elicited from circumstances that are ethically and practically impossible to
simulate in the laboratory.
It is well accepted that there are linguistic behaviors that mark the likelihood of
the presence of deception. The current study demonstrates in a real-world forensic
context the discriminative ability of the use of “um.” The results suggest that in
an attempt to successfully deceive, humans may strategically alter their linguistic
behavior. Furthermore, these findings suggest that a (re)conceptualization of “um”
as a lexical term that is under the control of the speaker, as opposed to an unplanned
speech error or filler, warrants further investigation.

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