Summary: A study published in Acta Psychologica finds that context and individual sensitivity to offense shape how taboo words affect attention and memory.
Source: University of Illinois
New research shows that taboo words can alter readers’ attention and memory—but the effect depends on context and how likely a reader is to be offended.
Researchers at the University of Illinois investigated how profanity and other taboo words influence attention, physiological responses, and recall. Their work suggests that the impact of these words is driven largely by the communicative context and by individual differences in sensitivity to offensive language, rather than by the words alone.
Previous laboratory studies often presented taboo words in isolation, which fails to capture how language is used in real interactions. “In everyday life, taboo words are spoken or written by particular speakers in particular situations,” said Kiel Christianson, professor of educational psychology. “The identity of the speaker and whether the situation makes the language appropriate change how strongly a listener or reader reacts.”
Christianson and colleagues ran two experiments using eye-tracking to measure where and for how long readers focused while silently reading sentences that contained either taboo words or euphemisms. The experiments, published in Acta Psychologica, also measured memory for nearby words and surveyed participants about their attitudes toward swearing to estimate each person’s likelihood of being offended.
The researchers proposed two main hypotheses: first, that profanity used in surprising or unexpected ways would capture more attention; second, that an individual’s propensity to be offended would influence reading speed and recall of a probe word appearing before the taboo word.
In the first experiment, 80 native speakers of American English read sentences describing characters characterized as either “saints” or “sinners” — labels intended to signal whether a speaker was likely or unlikely to use swear words. Each sentence placed the speaker in situations where swearing would be seen as either appropriate or inappropriate. Participants also completed a questionnaire assessing their attitudes toward people who swear, which served as an index of how likely they were to take offense.
Eye-tracking data revealed that readers spent more attention on taboo words than on non-taboo words, but context strongly influenced that effect. When a character portrayed as unlikely to use profanity (a “saint”) uttered a taboo word in a situation where swearing would make sense, readers slowed down and spent more time both on the sentence as a whole and on the taboo word itself. In those cases their accuracy in recalling the probe word improved.
“Some theoretical accounts predict better recall with taboo words, while others predict poorer memory because emotional and cognitive resources become taxed,” Christianson said. “Our data show elements of both theories, but neither alone explains the full pattern. In particular, the heightened attention when a typically restrained speaker uses profanity in a fitting context is not predicted by either existing theory.”
In the second experiment, all sentence speakers were depicted as “saints,” and each sentence began with a short cue indicating that a taboo word would follow (for example, “Everyone was shocked when…”). Readers who scored higher on the offense-susceptibility measure devoted more attention to probe words and generally showed improved recall—except in surprising contexts, where their attention shifted toward the taboo words or their euphemisms instead.
Overall, the findings indicate that as readers allocate more attention to a taboo word, their memory for other sentence details can suffer. Conversely, when a reader is less likely to take offense, a taboo word can enhance memorability by providing an emotionally salient but nonthreatening cue. Christianson summarized this by noting that a word’s “shock value” depends both on situational cues and on the audience member’s sensitivity to profanity.
Because neither binding theory nor global resource theory alone accounted for the observed effects, the authors propose a revised framework they call the situated speaker–hearer individual difference theory. This approach combines elements of both prior theories while explicitly incorporating sociolinguistic context and individual differences as central drivers of processing effects for taboo words.
The study was co-authored by Kiel Christianson, Peiyun Zhou, Cassie Palmer, and Adina Raizen. Data were collected using eye-tracking measures of attention, probe-word recall accuracy and reaction times, and individual-difference assessments of sensitivity to swearing.
The full study appears in Acta Psychologica under the title “Effects of context and individual differences on the processing of taboo words.” The authors conclude that processing effects attributed to taboo language are largely, but not entirely, a product of context and individual attitudes, and they emphasize the importance of studying taboo words in naturalistic language settings.
Abstract (condensed)
The authors compared two competing theories of taboo word processing—global resource theory and binding theory—by embedding taboo words within sentences and measuring eye movements, recall accuracy and reaction times, and individual differences in likelihood of taking offense. Results provided partial support for both theories but showed that context and individual attitudes play a key role in determining whether taboo words capture attention or impair memory. The authors propose a combined theoretical framework that integrates cognitive-resource and binding perspectives with sociolinguistic and individual-difference factors.
Authors: Kiel Christianson, Peiyun Zhou, Cassie Palmer, Adina Raizen. Published online July 2017 in Acta Psychologica. DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2017.05.012