ABSTRACT
Linguistic research into police interviewing has for many years focused on responding to linguistic problems rather than engaging directly with existing or emerging models of training. This has begun to change, especially with publications co-authored by linguists and psychologists, who have long been working directly with police on the issues around investigative interviewing. This chapter presents research into the language structures employed by the two main internationally recognised police interviewing methods: cognitive interviewing (United Kingdom) and the Reid method (United States). The chapter demonstrates how a linguistic approach can help to disambiguate the two methods and highlight incompatibilities between them. This is especially relevant in parts of the world where police academies have adopted parts of both methods without understanding the conflicts between their underlying questioning strategies.
