Cursed Concepts: New insights on combinatorial processing from ERP correlates of swearing in context

Anticipating theDamnReferent: How Comprehenders Rapidly Retrieve the Speaker's Attitude When Processing Negative Expressive Adjectives

“…Anticipation even took place when the expressive adjective mismatched the Target Referent morphologically. This supports the idea that processing the morpho‐syntactic properties of expressives might be delayed or suspended, resulting in a “wait and see” strategy (Donahoo et al., 2022). It could be argued that the effect of SPEAKER ATTITUDE could be attributed to utterance‐specific properties alone such as prosody.…”

“…This would be in line with the idea that expressive content is independent and constitutes a separate speech act from the utterance in which the negative expressive is embedded in, as suggested by Frazier et al (2015). Preliminary support for this comes from Donahoo et al (2022), who (using Event -Related Potentials) found that, when expressives are combined with a noun (damn dog), they elicit a different neural response relative to descriptive adjectives (black dog), but a similar response relative to nonsense adjectives (flerg dog). [AQ1] Donahoo et al (2022) argue that the interpretation of expressives involves a "wait and see" strategy in which processing of syntactic attachment is delayed or suspended.…”

“…Preliminary support for this comes from Donahoo et al. (2022), who (using Event ‐Related Potentials) found that, when expressives are combined with a noun ( damn dog ), they elicit a different neural response relative to descriptive adjectives ( black dog ), but a similar response relative to nonsense adjectives ( flerg dog ). [AQ1] Donahoo et al.…”

“…[AQ1] Donahoo et al. (2022) argue that the interpretation of expressives involves a “wait and see” strategy in which processing of syntactic attachment is delayed or suspended. However, this is only indirect evidence for the nonlocality of the interpretation of expressives, since Donahoo et al.…”

The power of swearing: What we know and what we don’t

“…For example, in Sulpizio et al's (2019) study, discussed in Section 2.2, taboo words were found to be processed more slowly, but more accurately, compared with neutral items. Swear words have also been shown to cause interference with the processing of other stimuli, thereby suggesting higher attention and salience (Colbeck and Bowers, 2012;Donahoo et al, 2022). One method of studying this phenomenon is through attentional blink, which shows temporal distraction or limitation in people's visual attention to sequential stimuli (Raymond et al, 1992;Shapiro et al, 1997).…”