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.

Crowdsourcing neuroscience: Inter-brain coupling during face-to-face interactions outside the laboratory.

When we feel connected or engaged during social behavior, are our brains in fact "in sync" in a formal, quantifiable sense? Most studies addressing this question use highly controlled tasks with homogenous subject pools. In an effort to take a more naturalistic approach, we collaborated with art institutions to crowdsource neuroscience data: Over the course of 5 years, we collected electroencephalogram (EEG) data from thousands of museum and festival visitors who volunteered to engage in a 10-min face-to-face interaction. Pairs of participants with various levels of familiarity sat inside the Mutual Wave Machine-an artistic neurofeedback installation that translates real-time correlations of each pair's EEG activity into light patterns. Because such inter-participant EEG correlations are prone to noise contamination, in subsequent offline analyses we computed inter-brain coupling using Imaginary Coherence and Projected Power Correlations, two synchrony metrics that are largely immune to instantaneous, noise-driven correlations. When applying these methods to two subsets of recorded data with the most consistent protocols, we found that pairs' trait empathy, social closeness, engagement, and social behavior (joint action and eye contact) consistently predicted the extent to which their brain activity became synchronized, most prominently in low alpha (~7-10 Hz) and beta (~20-22 Hz) oscillations. These findings support an account where shared engagement and joint action drive coupled neural activity and behavior during dynamic, naturalistic social interactions. To our knowledge, this work constitutes a first demonstration that an interdisciplinary, real-world, crowdsourcing neuroscience approach may provide a promising method to collect large, rich datasets pertaining to real-life face-to-face interactions. Additionally, it is a demonstration of how the general public can participate and engage in the scientific process outside of the laboratory. Institutions such as museums, galleries, or any other organization where the public actively engages out of self-motivation, can help facilitate this type of citizen science research, and support the collection of large datasets under scientifically controlled experimental conditions. To further enhance the public interest for the out-of-the-lab experimental approach, the data and results of this study are disseminated through a website tailored to the general public (wp.nyu.edu/mutualwavemachine).

Sand, Sandpaper, and Sandwiches: Evidence From a Masked Compound Priming Task in L1 and L2 Speakers of English.

This study follows the footsteps of Jonathan Grainger and colleagues by investigating compound processing in English monolinguals and Chinese-English bilinguals using the masked primed lexical decision paradigm. First language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers responded to a semantically transparent compound (e.g., snowball-SNOW), a semantically opaque compound (honeymoon-HONEY), and an orthographic control condition (e.g., sandwich-SAND). Results revealed significantly larger L1 priming effects in transparent and opaque compared to the control condition (Experiment 1A), whereas no significant differences across conditions were observed in L2 speakers (Experiment 1B). We argue that L1 populations are sensitive to morphological structure during the early stages of compound processing, whereas L2 speakers, in particular those with lower levels of language proficiency, employ a form-based type of analysis. Findings are interpreted within the framework of recent monolingual and bilingual models of complex word recognition.

Positional encoding of morphemes in visual word recognition.

Reading morphologically complex words requires analysis of their morphemic subunits (e.g., play + er); however, the positional constraints of morphemic processing are still little understood. The current study involved three unprimed lexical decision experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading and to investigate the role of semantics during the position encoding of morphemes. Experiment 1 revealed that transposed compound words were harder to reject than their controls (e.g., dreamday vs. shadeday), whereas there was no difference between transposed suffixed words and their controls (e.g., fulpain vs. adepain). Experiment 2 replicated the results for transposed compound words of the first experiment and further showed that there was no difference between transposed prefixed words and their controls (e.g., qualifydis vs. qualifymis). Experiment 3 investigated the role of semantic transparency in morpheme transposition effects and revealed a larger morpheme transposition effect for semantically transparent transposed compound words (e.g., cuptea vs. taptea) than for semantically opaque transposed compound words (e.g., linedead vs. deskdead). These results bring to light important differences in the positional encoding of stems and affixes, suggesting that prefixes and suffixes are recognized in a position-dependent manner compared to the position-independent encoding of embedded stems and that morpheme transposition effects are guided by semantics. The current findings call for more clearly specified theoretical models of visual word recognition that reflect the distinct positional constraints of stems and affixes, as well as the influence of semantics on morphological processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Cross-language morphological transfer in similar-script bilinguals.

The current study explored cross-language morphological transfer mechanisms using a similar-script morphological translation priming paradigm in highly proficient unbalanced Turkish (first language; L1)-English (second language; L2) bilinguals. Using noncognate English and Turkish stimuli that shared a similar meaning with no form overlap (e.g., ice [Eng.] - buz [Tur.]), in Experiment 1, L2 English stem targets (e.g., ICE) were primed by affixed L1 nonwords (e.g., buzca [iceish]), nonaffixed L1 nonwords (e.g., buznak [iceald]), and unrelated L1 nonwords (e.g., tusku [keyment]). The results revealed priming effects in both the affixed and nonaffixed nonword conditions relative to the unrelated control, and significantly larger priming in the affixed than the nonaffixed condition. In addition, enhanced cross-language morphological transfer effects were evidenced in bilinguals with an earlier age of L2 acquisition. In Experiment 2, English stem targets (e.g., ICE) were primed by nonaffixed L1 nonwords including translated stems (e.g., buznak [iceald]), semantically related stems (e.g., suzur [waterew]), and unrelated L1 nonwords (e.g., tuszur [keyew]). The results showed significantly larger priming effects in the translated condition compared with the semantic and unrelated control conditions, with no priming in the semantic condition relative to the unrelated condition, suggesting that cross-language morphological priming effects were specifically due to the lexico-semantic relationship between the embedded word and its translation equivalent.