Speech of young offenders as a function of their psychopathic tendencies

The purpose of this study was to analyse young psychopathic offenders' speech compared with controls and to determine whether it was dissimilar. An examination of two subsets of disfluencies in speech was conducted (i.e., filled pauses and discourse markers) to explore their disfluent language. Transcripts of Psychopathy Checklist-Revised Youth Version (PCL:YV) interviews from a sample of young offenders were analysed using Wmatrix software (Rayson, 2003, 2008). The young offenders were divided into a high psychopathy group (HP; n = 13) and a low psychopathy group (LP; n = 13). HP participants included more words relating to basic needs (i.e., money, sex) in their speech than their counterparts, but not fewer words relating to social needs (i.e., family, kin), which could reflect viewing the world in a more unemotional and instrumental way by HP individuals compared with LP participants. HP participants had fewer total disfluencies and filled pauses (i.e., uh, um) in their speech than LP participants. However, the usage of discourse markers (i.e., I mean, you know, like) was similar for HP and LP participants. Like adult psychopaths, the young offenders with higher psychopathic tendencies tended to use more basic needs words in their speech. Reduced filled pause use, which has been found to be related to individual's self-consciousness, may reflect less self-monitoring in psychopaths when they are engaging in secondary tasks (i.e., tasks that will not offer rewards). These findings provide further support that individual differences can be reflected by characteristics in speech. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).