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Background  Although children with intellectual disabilities (ID) often provide accurate witness testimony, jurors tend to perceive their witness statements to be inherently unreliable.

Method  The current study explored the free recall transcripts of child witnesses with ID who had watched a video clip, relative to those of typically developing (TD) age‐matched children, and assessed how mock jurors perceived these transcripts in the absence of knowledge of group (ID or TD) membership. A further aim of this research was to determine whether perceptions of credibility were associated with levels of free recall and witness characteristics (anxiety and mental age).

Results  Mock jurors rated the testimony of children with ID as less credible than that of a TD age‐matched comparison group. This was largely because of the transcripts of the children with ID containing fewer details than those of the TD children. Anxiety …