A persistent cultural myth suggests that individuals who swear frequently do so because they lack the vocabulary to express themselves with better words. But in 2015, researchers discovered that a robust knowledge of taboo language actually correlates with higher overall verbal ability, suggesting that a rich repertoire of curse words accompanies a well-stocked mental dictionary. The research was published in Language Sciences.
Listeners often judge people who use profanity as lazy, uneducated, or lacking in self-control. This assumption relies on the idea that swear words serve as a crutch for people struggling to find an appropriate descriptive term. Yet studies on human speech production indicate that when speakers fail to retrieve a specific word, they tend to hesitate or use filler expressions rather than automatically generating profanity.
To better understand the mental mechanics of swearing, psychologists Kristin L. Jay of Marist College and Timothy B. Jay of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts sought to test the poverty-of-vocabulary hypothesis. They wanted to know if a biological propensity for swearing truly points to a deficit in overall expressive ability.
The researchers designed a series of experiments relying on a standard psychological metric known as verbal fluency. Verbal fluency represents a person’s ability to quickly retrieve and produce words from their mental lexicon. Psychologists measure this trait by asking participants to list as many words as possible starting with specific letters within a short time limit. A person with high verbal fluency will generate a long list, indicating a wide and easily accessible vocabulary.
Kristin L. Jay and her coauthor compared performance on this standard letter assessment with two other cognitive tasks. They asked participants to name as many animals as possible, which tests the ability to recall items within a specific semantic category. They also asked participants to list as many curse words as possible.
In the first experiment, 43 college students sat in a room alone with an audio recorder. An automated voice instructed them to speak aloud as many words as they could think of starting with the letters F, A, and S, giving them one minute for each letter. The participants then completed one-minute spoken trials for animal words and taboo words.
The researchers observed a positive correlation across all the categories. Participants who excelled at generating words starting with standard letters also generated the highest number of taboo words. Rather than serving as evidence of a restricted vocabulary, the ability to generate numerous swear words pointed to strong overall verbal fluency.
The participants produced far more animal words than letter-group words, and they produced the fewest words in the taboo category. Participants paused longer before reciting their first taboo word compared to the animal category. This delay raised a secondary question about whether people were simply hesitant to swear aloud in an academic setting.
Words tend to be organized in the human brain by their literal definitions, known as denotative meanings. Animal words share this kind of structure, making it relatively easy for people to systematically name farm animals, then zoo animals, then pets. Taboo words lack a unifying literal definition, instead forming a mental category based entirely on emotional weight.
Linguists typically divide offensive language into distinct subcategories, which the study participants’ responses seemed to reflect. People generated general words that express heightened emotional states at much higher rates than words used to insult specific groups based on demographic traits. Just ten common swear words made up over half of the recorded responses.
The researchers observed an exception to the low rate of targeted slurs. Female-sex-related insults appeared frequently in the respondents’ lists, ranking alongside the most common general swear words. The authors suggested that such words might be transitioning in modern usage, functioning less as specific derogatory descriptors and more as general emotional outbursts.
To eliminate the possibility that spoken hesitation suppressed the taboo word count, the researchers conducted a second experiment with 49 different college students. This time, participants wrote their responses on paper and had two minutes to complete each category. The written format also reduced the cognitive load, as participants did not have to hold their previous answers in their working memory to avoid repeating themselves.
The written test produced the same pattern of results as the spoken test. Verbal fluency in the standard letter task positively correlated with animal word fluency, and the researchers observed a similar positive trend matching those categories with taboo word fluency. Even with the privacy of writing on paper, participants still generated fewer curse words than animal words.
This consistency suggests that the size of the taboo vocabulary category is genuinely smaller or organized differently in the human brain compared to standard semantic categories. Similar to the first experiment, a small handful of expressive curse words dominated the lists, while specific slurs appeared relatively rarely.
The researchers then expanded their investigation to include personality traits, running a third written experiment with 126 students. Participants filled out extensive questionnaires assessing their religious habits, self-reported swearing frequency, and basic personality traits. Psychologists use an assessment called the Big Five personality inventory to measure universal human traits, which include openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Once again, the tests showed positive correlations between standard verbal fluency, animal fluency, and taboo fluency. In addition, the findings mapped onto established observations regarding how different personalities approach swearing. Higher taboo word fluency positively correlated with neuroticism and openness, while showing a negative correlation with agreeableness and conscientiousness.
When analyzing the responses by sex, the researchers found few differences in offensive language performance. Men and women produced highly similar vocabularies in the taboo category. The top eight swear words generated by women matched the exact top eight words generated by men, and both groups produced gender-based insults at similar rates.
While the research challenges the idea that swearing stems from a lack of vocabulary, the authors noted a few boundaries to their conclusions. The experiments primarily relied on samples of college students, a demographic that naturally possesses above-average verbal abilities due to academic admission filters.
To benchmark the data, the researchers compared the students’ performance on the standard letter task to established national averages. The students generated volumes aligned perfectly with existing norms for educated adults, indicating that the participant group represented a typical cognitive baseline.
The specific phrasing of the prompt might have also influenced the types of words generated. Asking participants to list “curse words or swear words” may have mentally directed them toward general emotional outbursts. The researchers proposed that asking for insults or slurs might have yielded a different set of vocabulary words, leaving room for future investigations into how the brain organizes offensive language.
Finally, the researchers emphasized the distinction between knowing taboo words and choosing to use them in everyday life. A person’s performance on a fluency test measures the size of their mental lexicon, but the actual frequency of their swearing depends on social etiquette, impulse control, and the context of their environment.
The study, “Taboo word fluency and knowledge of slurs and general pejoratives: deconstructing the poverty-of-vocabulary myth,” was authored by Kristin L. Jay and Timothy B. Jay.
