While both semantic and highly emotional (i.e., taboo) words can interfere with speech production, different theoretical mechanisms have been proposed to explain why interference occurs. Two experiments investigated these theoretical approaches by comparing the magnitude of these two types of interference and the stages at which they occur during picture naming. Participants named target pictur...

Taboo words are defined and sanctioned by institutions of power (e.g., religion, media), and prohibitions are reiterated in child-rearing practices. Native speakers acquire folk knowledge of taboo words, but it lacks the complexity that psychological science requires for an understanding of swearing. Misperceptions persist in psychological science and in society at large about how frequently pe...

the research attempted to discover the norms of translating taboo words and concepts after the islamic revolution in iran using toury’s (1995) framework for classification of norms. the corpus of the study composed of coelho’s novels between 1990 and 2005 and their persian translations which were prepared and analyzed manually to discover the norms. during both the selection of novels for trans...

Peter Singer is used to controversy—indeed, he seems to court it—but nothing could have prepared him for the reaction which followed his recent review of Midas Dekker’s Dearest Pet for the on-line version of Nerve magazine. Dekker’s book is a social, historical, and psychological examination of bestiality, and Singer’s review has been widely perceived as condoning the practice. The horrified re...