L’influence médiatique sur les jugements judiciaires : rôle du style d’écriture dans la formation des jugements

This article has two main goals: first, to review past research concerning the influence of pretrial publicity on judiciary judgements, and second, to present new empirical data concerning the impact of writing style in the media influence phenomenon. The three studies presented in this article show: 1/ that the morphosyntactical style of press articles can be distinguished as a function of the domain to which they pertain (judiciary, economic, politics, sports), 2/ that readers can readily recognize and identify the judiciary morphosyntactical style, and 3/ that the conformity of an article vs. its non-conformity to the judiciary style has some independent effect on memory about the article's content and on the elaboration of judiciary judgements by readers.