Slurs, Synonymy, and Taboo

Taboo word fluency and knowledge of slurs and general pejoratives: deconstructing the poverty-of-vocabulary myth

A folk assumption about colloquial speech is that taboo words are used because speakers cannot find better words with which to express themselves: because speakers lack vocabulary. A competing possibility is that fluency is fluency regardless of subject matter—that there is no reason to propose a difference in lexicon size and ease of access for taboo as opposed to emotionally-neutral words. In...

Canadian health care slurs dismissed as "rhetoric".

Processing Neutral , Emotion and Taboo

Bilinguals have reported that they have a stronger emotional experience in their native language (L1) than in their second language (L2). Behavioral studies are inconclusive about this question. However, studies that used skin conductance levels as a dependent variable are clearer about this effect: participants elicit a stronger skin conductance response on emotional and taboo words in L1 comp...

Dutch taboo norms

This article provides norms for general taboo, personal taboo, insult, valence, and arousal for 672 Dutch words, including 202 taboo words. Norms were collected using a 7-point Likert scale and based on ratings by psychology students from the Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands. The sample consisted of 87 psychology students (58 females, 29 males). We obtained high reliability based...

Recalling taboo and nontaboo words.

People remember emotional and taboo words better than neutral words. It is well known that words that are processed at a deep (i.e., semantic) level are recalled better than words processed at a shallow (i.e., purely visual) level. To determine how depth of processing influences recall of emotional and taboo words, a levels of processing paradigm was used. Whether this effect holds for emotiona...