This paper investigates how individuals perceive hyperbole in victim statements. Despite being one of the most commonly used literary tropes, the comprehension and cognition of hyperbole has been largely ignored in the psycholinguistics literature, and despite detailed literature outlining the emotional behaviour of victims, the use of figurative language has been largely ignored in the forensics literature. In the present study, two experiments were undertaken. In Experiment 1, 32 participants were recruited from groups with forensic experience or training. Participants were presented with 16 victim statements; eight contained a number of hyperbolic phrases and eight contained non-hyperbolic counterparts. After reading each statement, participants were asked to answer questions that would quantify perceived credibility on accounts of belief, sympathy, victim-impact, and likeability. The results from Experiment 1 showed that hyperbolic speech made a significant negative impact on all four credibility measures. In Experiment 2, 32 jury-eligible individuals performed the same task. Results from this experiment demonstrated that the use of hyperbole made testimonies more believable and made the victim seem more impacted. Results are discussed in terms of the real-world implications of using hyperbolic language, and individual differences in the comprehension of, and reaction to, figurative statements.

本文研究了个人如何在受害者陈述中感知夸张。尽管是最常使用的文学比喻之一，对夸张的理解和认知在心理学语言学文献中已被大体忽略，尽管详细的文献概述了受害者的情感行为，但在法医文献中却已大大忽略了比喻性语言的使用。 。在本研究中，进行了两个实验。在实验1中，从具有法医经验或培训的小组中招募了32名参与者。与会者获得了16份受害者声明；八个包含多个双曲短语，八个包含非双曲短语。阅读每条陈述后，要求参与者回答一些问题，这些问题可以基于信念来量化可感知的信誉，同情，影响受害者和喜欢的人。实验1的结果表明，夸张的言语对所有四个信誉度指标均产生了显着的负面影响。在实验2中，有32名符合陪审团资格的人执行了相同的任务。该实验的结果表明，夸张的使用提供了证词更可信，使受害者似乎受到更大的影响。根据使用双曲线语言在现实世界中的含义以及对表达方式的理解和反应方面的个体差异来讨论结果。