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The constant internal monitoring of speech is a crucial feature to ensure the fairly error-free process of speech production. It has been argued that internal speech monitoring takes place through detection of conflict between different response options or “speech plans”. Speech errors are thought to occur because two (or more) competing speech plans become activated, and the speaker is unable to inhibit the erroneous plan(s) prior to vocalization. A prime example for a speech plan that has to be suppressed is the involuntary utterance of a taboo word. The present study seeks to examine the suppression of involuntary taboo word utterances. We used the “Spoonerisms of Laboratory Induced Predisposition” (SLIP) paradigm to elicit two competing speech plans, one being correct and one embodying either a taboo word or a non-taboo word spoonerism. Behavioral data showed that inadequate speech plans generally were effectively suppressed, although more effectively in the taboo word spoonerism condition. Event-related potential (ERP) analysis revealed a broad medial frontal negativity (MFN) after the target word pair presentation, interpreted as reflecting conflict detection and resolution to suppress the inadequate speech plan. The MFN was found to be more pronounced in the taboo word spoonerism compared to the neutral word spoonerism condition, indicative of a higher level of conflict when subjects suppressed the involuntary utterance of taboo words.

Motor and vocal tics are the main symptom of Gilles de la Tourette-syndrome (GTS). A particular complex vocal tic comprises the utterance of swear words, termed coprolalia. Since taboo words are socially inappropriate, they are normally suppressed by people, which implies cognitive control processes. To investigate the control of the unintentional pronunciation of taboo words and the associated processes of conflict monitoring, we used the \"Spoonerisms of Laboratory Induced Predisposition\" (SLIP) paradigm. Participants read multiple inductor word pairs with the same phonemes, followed by pronouncing a target pair with inverse phonemes. This led to a conflict between two competing speech plans: the correct word pair and the word pair with inverted phonemes. Latter speech error, a spoonerism, could result in a neutral or taboo word. We investigated 19 patients with GTS and 23 typically developed controls (TDC) and measured participants' electroencephalography (EEG) during the SLIP task. At the behavioral level less taboo than neutral word spoonerisms occurred in both groups without significant differences. Event-related brain potentials (ERP) revealed a difference between taboo and neutral word conditions in the GTS group at the midline electrodes in a time range of 250-400 ms after the speech prompt, which was not found in the TDC group. The extent of this effect depended on the number of inductor word pairs, suggesting an increasing level of cognitive control in the GTS group. The differences between taboo and neutral word conditions in patients with GTS compared to TDC suggest an altered recruitment of cognitive control processes in GTS, likely enlisted to suppress taboo words.

Under proscriptive regimes, like the FCCban on obscenities on broadcast television and radio, or the edicts of the royal court in Tahiti prohibiting the utterances of the king's name (Simons 1982), one can't even innocently \"mention\" a taboo expression, by embedding the wayward curse in a quote, for instance, without the utterance counting as a taboo \"use.\" A pair of papers, Frekko on the avoidance of Castilian in Catalonia, and Moore on a moral panic surrounding a stigmatized dialect in Dublin, showcase unmentionable languages and \"accents,\" units that possess much of the performative potency of swear words.

Cross-culturally personal names are frequently avoided to the point of being taboo. The paper seeks to give a semiotically grounded analysis of why names in particular are so often taboo, and in so doing attempts to shed light on the species of performativity which undergirds the unmentionability of verbal taboos. From the avoidance of names in second-person address to the unmentionability of forms phonetically similar to the avoided name, a gradient scale of unmentionability is sketched out for the case of name taboos. Through the analysis of a wealth of examples, the paper shows how the patterning of the avoidance of a form is inextricably linked to its performative function and ideological conceptualization

Everywhere, there are topics and words that local conventions brand as \"unmentionable\" yet people manage to communicate about the unmentionable nevertheless. What are their strategies for doing so, and how well can those strategies work? This paper considers communicative means for mentioning or implicating the unmentionable, without actually breaching the norms that made the material noxious. Also considered are the larger cultural issues and social dramas that may be at stake. Register shifts and footing shifts are common strategies for containing noxious material in a linguistic cordon sanitaire. So is conspicuous avoidance (of the gorilla in the room). But the public game of containment is only the most overt manifestation of the issues potentially concerned. Much mischief and many unforeseen entailments lurk in the shadows of these communicative efforts. The moral life of language resides in much larger arenas than the existing literature on \"verbal taboo\" and politeness generally envisions. Words not spoken, discourse contexts and histories, interlocutors' responses, genre conventions, local regimes of language, truth, and knowledge—all these combine with the actual utterances, to multiple, often unforeseeable, effects.

Although language is an effective vehicle for communication, it is unclear how linguistic and communicative abilities relate to each other. Some researchers have argued that communicative message generation involves perspective taking (mentalizing), and—crucially—that mentalizing depends on language. We employed a verbal communication paradigm to directly test whether the generation of a communicative action relies on mentalizing and whether the cerebral bases of communicative message generation are distinct from parts of cortex sensitive to linguistic variables. We found that dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a brain area consistently associated with mentalizing, was sensitive to the communicative intent of utterances, irrespective of linguistic difficulty. In contrast, left inferior frontal cortex, an area known to be involved in language, was sensitive to the linguistic demands of utterances, but not to communicative intent. These findings show that communicative and linguistic abilities rely on cerebrally (and computationally) distinct mechanisms.

Swear words are generally used to articulate anger, pain, excitement, frustration, or surprise. It is often imitated by children who may not really understand the meaning of the swear words. This survey-based study aims to identify the swear utterances of male and female teenagers, find out their commonly-used swear words, and investigate whether bilingual male or female students of Grade 12, Binus International School, Simprug, Jakarta, use more swear words. A combination of multiple choice and open-ended questionnaire was constructed and the analysis revealed that swearing is inevitable and becomes a part of the male and female language repertoire. Both groups of students are said to employ the use of Indonesian and English swear words in carrying-out conversations in order to release stress and express intense emotions. However, male students tend to use more swear words that are associated with sexuality.