Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Transmission of information by means of language is a po-tentially lossy process. Especially adjunct information, suchas the graded degree of evidence, is a piece of informationthat seems prima facie likely to be distorted by reproductionnoise. To investigate this issue, we present the results of a two-step iterated narration study: first, we collected a corpus of250 crime story reproductions that were produced in parallelreproduction chains of 5 generations in depth, for 5 differentseed stories; a second separate large-scale experiment then tar-geted readers’ interpretation of these reproductions. Crucially,strength of evidence for the guilt of each story’s suspect(s)was manipulated in the initial seed stories. Across genera-tions, readers’ guilt perceptions decreased when the evidencewas originally strong, but remained stable when evidence wasoriginally weak. Analysis of linguistic measures revealed thatdissimilarity between a seed story and its reproduction, storylength, and amount of hedging language affected the readers’own guilt perception and the readers’ attribution of guilt per-ception to the author differently. The results provide evidencethat evidential information indeed influences guilt perceptionin complex ways.