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 effect of bilingualism on executive functions when languages are similar: a comparison between Hungarian-Serbian and Slovak-Serbian young adult bilinguals.

Among the factors argued to contribute to a bilingual advantage in executive function (EF), the combination of languages spoken by the bilingual is often overlooked. In this study, we explored the role of language similarity on memory and EF task by comparing performance of three groups of young adults-Hungarian-Serbian and Slovak-Serbian early balanced bilinguals, and Serbian-speaking monolinguals. Slovak is typologically related to Serbian, which are both Slavic, in contrast to Hungarian, which is Finno-Ugric. On the computerized tasks from the CANTAB battery (CANTAB Cognition, 2016, www.cantab.com), differences between monolinguals and bilinguals emerged on the EF tasks: Stockings of Cambridge (SOC) and Attentional Set Shifting (AST), but not the memory tasks: Delayed Matching to Sample (DMS), Paired Associate Learning (PAL), Spatial Working Memory (SWM). Both Hungarian-Serbian and Slovak-Serbian bilinguals outperformed the monolinguals on the more difficult SOC tasks, solved using more than a minimally required number of moves. This is in line with reports that bilinguals perform better under more complex conditions that require more monitoring and switching. However, bilinguals speaking Hungarian and Serbian spent less time preparing to execute the simpler SOC tasks, which can be solved in a minimum of two or three moves; they also exhibited reduced local switching cost and were faster overall on AST than both the Slovak-Serbian bilinguals and Serbian monolinguals. The advantageous performance of speakers of the typologically unrelated languages in our study suggests that these bilinguals may have more efficient attention switching and inhibition systems than bilinguals who speak typologically similar languages.

Redesigning the exploration of semantic dynamics: SSD account in light of regression design.

The Semantic Settling Dynamics model postulated that the seemingly inconsistent effects of lexical ambiguity are, in fact, a systematic manifestation of the specific dynamics that arise as a consequence of the amount of time spent in processing. The model has thus far been tested by prolonging lexical decision and comparing homonymous, polysemous, and unambiguous words in a factorial design. Here, we kept the strategy of task manipulation but tested the model by using continuous measures as indices of the level of lexical ambiguity and their slopes as indices of the effect size. We expressed the size of the polysemy effect as the slope of the effect of entropy of sense probability distribution and the size of the homonymy effect as the redundancy of sense probability distribution. Comparing lexical decision tasks with the shorter and longer time spent in processing, we observed the predicted decrease in the effect of the polysemy level as well as the predicted increase in the effect of homonymy level.

Information and learning in processing adjective inflection.

We investigated the processing of inflected Serbian adjective forms to bring together quantitative linguistic measures from two frameworks - information theory and discrimination learning. From each framework we derived several quantitative descriptions of an inflectional morphological system and fitted two separate regression models to the processing latencies that were elicited by inflected adjectival forms presented in a visual lexical decision task. The model, which was based on lexical distributional and information theory revealed a dynamic interplay of information. The information was sensitive to syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions of variation; the paradigmatic information (formalized as respective relative entropies) was also modulated by lemma frequency. The discrimination learning based model revealed an equally complex pattern, involving several learning-based variables. The two models revealed strikingly similar patterns of results, as confirmed by the very high proportion of shared variance in model predictions (85.83%). Our findings add to the body of research demonstrating that complex morphological phenomena can arise as a consequence of the basic principles of discrimination learning. Learning discriminatively about inflectional paradigms and classes, and about their contextual or syntagmatic embedding, sheds light on human language-processing efficiency and on the fascinating complexity of naturally emerged language systems.