Young children's competency as witnesses in legal proceedings has been debated during the past several years. This has been due in part to greater emphasis on prosecuting perpetrators of child sexual abuse and the consequent increase in the number of children being asked to testify at the trial of their alleged abusers. Little basic research has been done on one component of competency: children's definitions of the truth and lies. In this article, federal and state rules of evidence and case law regarding children's competency are reviewed. Previous investigations of children's definitions of lies are then presented, followed by a description of a more recent experiment. The results of this experiment suggest that children do have definitions of the truth in one regard that make it appropriate for them to be considered competent witnesses. The results also raise concerns about young children's eyewitness ability.
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Haugaard et al. (1991) studied this question.
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