ABSTRACT

Strong emotional words tend to command attention and disrupt cognitive processing. Three experiments investigated whether taboo context, defined by the inclusion of taboo distractors in a picture-word interference task, influences how a distractor’s emotional properties affect speech production. Participants named target pictures accompanied by written distractors varying in arousal and valence. Trials were presented in blocks with negative, positive, and neutral distractors that also included or omitted taboo distractors. Results showed that positive distractors had no significant effect on naming times, whereas negative distractors slowed picture naming only when they were higher in arousal and only in a taboo block. Naming times were slower overall in the taboo context compared to the non-taboo context. These findings suggest that the presence of taboo words changes the influence of non-taboo emotional words during speech production, which has implications for the role of attention in speech production theories and more broadly for cognition.

摘要

强烈的情感词往往会引起注意并破坏认知处理。三项实验调查了禁忌语境（由在图词干扰任务中包含禁忌干扰物来定义）是否会影响干扰物的情绪特性如何影响言语产生。参与者命名了目标图片，并附有不同的唤醒和效价的书面干扰物。试验以带有负面、正面和中性干扰项的块呈现，其中还包括或省略了禁忌干扰项。结果表明，积极干扰因素对命名时间没有显着影响，而消极干扰因素只有在唤醒度较高且仅在禁忌块中才会减缓图片命名。与非禁忌语境相比，禁忌语境中的命名时间总体上更慢。