Research question: What kind of relationship, if any, exists between an attorney’s use of verbal fillers during oral arguments in front of the United States Supreme Court, and the Justices subsequent opinions?
Research Methods and Data: Statistical analysis alone was inadequate to explore the research question thoroughly, therefore a mixed-method analysis, using quantitative and qualitative methods, was used.
The data set was derived from a set of seven Supreme Court transcripts available online from a previous study conducted by the University of Washington.
The quantitative portion was performed through the use of the JASP statistics program. Four forms of verbal fillers were used as independent variables and compared to the subsequent rulings by each Supreme Court Justice.
For the qualitative portion of the research study, the same seven Supreme Court transcripts were used as the corpus. The programs, AntConc and Delve tool, were used to compare verbal disfluency usage with the extant literature themes found in the literature review to determine whether verbal fillers followed the same patterns in the Supreme Court context.