Taboo language across the globe: A multi-lab study.

The use of taboo words represents one of the most common and arguably universal linguistic behaviors, fulfilling a wide range of psychological and social functions. However, in the scientific literature, taboo language is poorly characterized, and how it is realized in different languages and populations remains largely unexplored. Here we provide a database of taboo words, collected from different linguistic communities (Study 1, N = 1046), along with their speaker-centered semantic characterization (Study 2, N = 455 for each of six rating dimensions), covering 13 languages and 17 countries from all five permanently inhabited continents. Our results show that, in all languages, taboo words are mainly characterized by extremely low valence and high arousal, and very low written frequency. However, a significant amount of cross-country variability in words' tabooness and offensiveness proves the importance of community-specific sociocultural knowledge in the study of taboo language.

The Role of the Root in Spoken Word Recognition in Hebrew: An Auditory Gating Paradigm.

Very few studies have investigated online spoken word recognition in templatic languages. In this study, we investigated both lexical (neighborhood density and frequency) and morphological (role of root morpheme) aspects of spoken word recognition of Hebrew, a templatic language, using the traditional gating paradigm. Additionally, we compared the traditional gating paradigm with a novel, phoneme-based gating paradigm. The phoneme-based approach allows for better control of information available at each gate. We found lexical effects with high-frequency words and low neighborhood density words being recognized at earlier gates. We also found that earlier access to root-morpheme information enabled word recognition at earlier gates. Finally, we showed that both the traditional gating paradigm and gating by phoneme paradigm yielded equivalent results.

The role of the root in auditory word recognition of Hebrew.

Evidence from visual word recognition has shown that the root morpheme plays a particularly important role in recognition of nouns in templatic languages [e.g., Velan & Frost, 2009 (Hebrew), Perea, abu Mallouh, & Carreiras, 2010 (Arabic)]. Letter transposition studies in masked priming have proved a useful tool for investigating letter flexibility in the visual domain. Due to the linear nature of the auditory signal, such manipulation is not possible for spoken words. In this study, we use a novel application of the phonemic restoration paradigm to explore the role of morphology in auditory word recognition. In two separate experiments, we show that in auditory word recognition the root plays an important role in Hebrew noun recognition, with words with masked root sounds being especially difficult to recover. This study provides additional evidence in favor of the privileged role of the root in Semitic lexical access and its function in morphological decomposition.