Early identification of taboo words reveals a prominent role of semantic information in visual word recognition

This research used the progressive demasking paradigm to investigate whether perceptual word identification is facilitated by semantic information. Experiment 1 revealed faster identification for taboo than neutral words. Experiment 2 revealed faster identification for taboo than emotionally-comparable non-taboo words, whereas the difference with respect to neutral words was possibly mitigated by list-wise factors related to list composition. Moreover, the facilitation for taboo words was impervious to habituation. The taboo connotation advantage seemingly originates from the attentional capture triggered by tabooness, a socio-culturally determined semantic feature that, under appropriate contextual conditions, modulates perceptual word identification. Our results suggest that (a) semantic processing is a pervasive component of any task involving word processing, and (b) when semantic information does not hinder the main task, it may influence even the earliest stages of word perceptua...

This research used the progressive demasking paradigm to investigate whether perceptual word identification is facilitated by semantic information. Experiment 1 revealed faster identification for taboo than neutral words. Experiment 2 revealed faster identification for taboo than emotionally-comparable non-taboo words, whereas the difference with respect to neutral words was possibly mitigated by list-wise factors related to list composition. Moreover, the facilitation for taboo words was impervious to habituation. The taboo connotation advantage seemingly originates from the attentional capture triggered by tabooness, a socio-culturally determined semantic feature that, under appropriate contextual conditions, modulates perceptual word identification. Our results suggest that (a) semantic processing is a pervasive component of any task involving word processing, and (b) when semantic information does not hinder the main task, it may influence even the earliest stages of word perceptual identification.