Evaluating the utility of elicited imitation as a measure of listening comprehension in the context of forensic linguistics

The Miranda rights guard against self-incrimination and guarantee access to legal counsel (Miranda v. Arizona, 1966). Individuals may waive these rights if they do so knowingly, and this requires them to comprehend their rights. Many L1 English speakers do not adequately understand the Miranda warning, and the situation is even worse for L2 speakers (e.g., Pavlenko, Hepford, Jarvis, 2019). Research is needed to assess Miranda comprehension among vulnerable populations and to develop and validate instruments that are both accurate and efficient measures of Miranda rights comprehension. The Guidelines for Communication of Rights to Non-Native Speakers of English (CoRG, 2015) emphasize the importance of assessing Miranda comprehension by having individuals paraphrase the Miranda sentences. Yet, Pavlenko et al. (2019) found that verbatim sentence repetition produces similar results to paraphrasing. The present study further explores this finding by comparing L2 performance on the oral equivalents of the types of written tasks used by Pavlenko et al.: elicited imitation (EI) and oral paraphrasing (OP). The purpose of the study is to determine whether EI can substitute for OP as a test of listening comprehension. Forty-two L2 English and eight L1 English participants completed both an EI and an OP test consisting of the same 30 sentences (see Ortega et al., 2002). The results showed a high correlation (r >.90) between the two measures, suggesting that both tests measure the same construct. Drawing on these findings, we discuss the advantages of EI over OP as a measure of listening comprehension and Miranda competency.