A deeply held cultural myth holds that people who swear frequently do so because they lack the vocabulary to express themselves in better ways. But in 2015, researchers found that a solid knowledge of taboo language actually correlated with improved overall language ability, suggesting that a rich repertoire of curse words comes with a rich mental lexicon. The study was published in the journal Language Sciences.
Listeners often judge people who use profanity to be lazy, uneducated, or lacking self-control. This assumption is based on the idea that swearing acts as a crutch for people who struggle to find appropriate descriptive terms. However, research into human speech production shows that when speakers can’t find a particular word, they tend to hesitate or use filler expressions rather than automatically producing profanity.
Psychologists Kristin L. Jay of Marist College and Timothy B. Jay of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts set out to test the vocabulary poverty hypothesis to better understand the psychological mechanisms of swearing. They wanted to know whether the biological tendency to swear really indicates a general lack of expressiveness.
The researchers designed a series of experiments based on a standard psychological measure known as verbal fluency. Verbal fluency refers to your ability to quickly retrieve and generate words from your mental vocabulary. Psychologists measure this trait by asking participants to name as many words that start with a certain letter as possible within a limited amount of time. People with high language fluency create long lists that represent a wide range of easily accessible vocabulary.
Kristin L. Jay and her coauthors compared performance on this standard letter assessment to two other cognitive tasks. They asked participants to name as many animals as possible and tested their ability to recall items within specific semantic categories. Participants were also asked to list as many curse words as possible.
In the first experiment, 43 college students sat alone in a room with an audio recorder. The automated voice asked them to say out loud as many words as they could think of starting with the letters F, A, and S, and to speak for one minute for each letter. Participants then completed a 1-minute audio test on animal language and taboo words.
The researchers observed positive correlations across all categories. Participants who were better at producing words that started with standard letters produced the most taboo words. Rather than being evidence of a limited vocabulary, the ability to generate a large number of expletives was indicative of strong overall language fluency.
Participants produced significantly more animal words than words in the letter group and the least of words in the taboo category. Participants paused longer before reciting the first taboo word compared to the animal category. This delay raised the secondary question of whether people are simply hesitant to swear the oath out loud in academic settings.
In the human brain, words tend to be organized by literal definitions, known as denotative meanings. Because animal words share this kind of structure, it’s relatively easy for people to systematically name farm animals, then zoo animals, and finally pets. Taboo words do not have a uniform literal definition, but instead form mental categories based entirely on emotional weight.
Linguists typically divide offensive language into distinct subcategories, and research participants’ responses appear to reflect that. People produced general words expressing heightened emotional states at a much higher rate than words used to insult specific groups based on demographic characteristics. Just 10 common swear words accounted for more than half of the recorded responses.
The researchers observed an exception where the proportion of targeted slurs was low. Sex-related insults for women frequently appeared on respondents’ lists, ranking alongside the most common general curse words. The authors suggested that such words are in flux in modern usage and may function as a general outburst of emotion rather than as a specific derogatory description.
To rule out the possibility that verbal hesitation suppressed the number of taboo words, the researchers conducted a second experiment with 49 different college students. This time, participants wrote their responses on paper and had 2 minutes to complete each category. The written format also reduced cognitive load, as participants did not have to hold previous answers in working memory to avoid repeating them.
The written exam had the same pattern of results as the oral exam. Word fluency in standard letter tasks was positively correlated with animal word fluency, and the researchers observed a similar positive tendency to match these categories with taboo word fluency. Even with the privacy of writing on paper, participants produced fewer curse words than animal words.
This consistency suggests that, compared to standard semantic categories, taboo lexical categories are actually smaller in size or are organized differently in the human brain. As in the first experiment, a small number of expressive expletives dominated the list, but certain slurs appeared relatively infrequently.
The researchers then expanded their study to include personality traits and conducted a third written experiment with 126 students. Participants completed an extensive questionnaire assessing religious practices, self-reported frequency of swearing, and basic personality traits. Psychologists use an assessment called the Big Five Personality Inventory to measure universal human traits such as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Again, the test showed a positive correlation between standard language fluency, animal fluency, and taboo fluency. Additionally, this finding mapped onto established observations about how different personalities approach name-calling. Higher taboo word fluency was positively correlated with neuroticism and tolerance, but negatively correlated with agreeableness and conscientiousness.
When analyzing responses by gender, the researchers found little difference in performance of aggressive verbal expressions. Men and women produced very similar vocabularies in the taboo category. The top eight swear words produced by women matched exactly the top eight words produced by men, and both groups produced gender-based insults at similar rates.
The study challenges the idea that swear words are due to a lack of vocabulary, but the authors note that there are some boundaries to their conclusions. The experiment was mainly based on a sample of university students. College students are a demographic that naturally possesses above-average language proficiency thanks to academic admissions filters.
To benchmark the data, the researchers compared students’ performance on a standard letter task to established national averages. The students produced a volume that was completely consistent with the existing norms of educated adults. This indicates that the participant group represents a typical cognitive baseline.
The specific phrasing of the prompt may also have influenced the types of words produced. Asking participants to list “curse words and abusive words” may have mentally steered them toward general emotional outbursts. The researchers suggested that asking for insults and slurs may have yielded a different set of vocabulary, leaving room for future research into how the brain organizes offensive words.
Finally, the researchers emphasized the difference between knowing a taboo word and choosing to use it in everyday life. Fluency test performance measures a person’s mental vocabulary, but the actual frequency of swearing depends on social etiquette, impulse control, and environmental context.
The study, “Taboo Word Fluency and Knowledge of Slurs and Common Derogatory Words: Debunking the Myths of Vocabulary Poverty,” was authored by Christine L. Jay and Timothy B. Jay.
