Investigating the relationship between L2 proficiency and Miranda rights comprehension: a partial replication of Pavlenko et al. (2019).

This article focuses on replicating and extending research on the comprehension of the Miranda warning by non-native (L2) English speakers, using an elicited imitation (EI) test embedded with Miranda sentences to assess both English proficiency and Miranda comprehension (MC). The study partially replicates Pavlenko et al. (2019) with a different L2 population—immigrants to the US—and a different method, confirming that L2 speakers generally struggle to comprehend the Miranda warning, though a somewhat higher proportion (19.4%) met the comprehension threshold compared to the original study (2.8%). Results show a strong correlation between EI scores (English proficiency) and MC scores, and a logistic regression model demonstrated that EI scores can reliably predict whether an individual reaches the MC threshold, providing probabilistic data useful for forensic linguistics and legal contexts. The study argues that EI testing is preferable to paraphrasing tasks for assessing comprehension deficits in L2 speakers and highlights the need for further research on functional understanding of Miranda rights beyond linguistic comprehension.