School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
Herston Imaging Research Facility and School of Clinical Sciences, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2019 Mar 5;14(3):271-279. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsz009.
Every language has words deemed to be socially inappropriate or 'taboo' to utter. Taboo word production appears prominently in language disorders following brain injury. Yet, we know little about the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in processing taboo compared to neutral language. In the present study, we introduced taboo distractor words in the picture word interference paradigm during functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how these words influence spoken word production. Taboo distractor words significantly slowed picture-naming latencies compared to neutral words. This interference effect was associated with increased blood oxygen level dependent signal across a distributed thalamo-cortical network including bilateral anterior cingulate cortex and left inferior frontal gyrus, left posterior middle temporal gyrus and right thalamus. We interpret our findings as being consistent with an account integrating both domain-general attention-capture/distractor blocking and language-specific mechanisms in processing taboo words during spoken word production.
每种语言都有一些被认为是不适当或“禁忌”的词语，不宜说出。禁忌词的产生在脑损伤后的语言障碍中尤为明显。然而，与中性语言相比，我们对处理禁忌词所涉及的认知和神经机制知之甚少。在本研究中，我们在功能磁共振成像期间引入了禁忌干扰词，以调查这些词如何影响口语产生。与中性词相比，禁忌干扰词显著延长了图片命名的潜伏期。这种干扰效应与包括双侧前扣带皮层和左侧额下回、左侧后颞中回和右侧丘脑在内的分布式丘脑-皮层网络中的血氧水平依赖信号增加有关。我们的研究结果表明，这与一种解释一致，该解释将注意捕获/干扰物阻断的一般领域机制与处理口语产生过程中的禁忌词的语言特异性机制结合起来。
