Despite the ubiquity of taboo words in everyday language, we do not know much about Slovenian taboo words from a psycholinguistic perspective, as most of the studies are done on English speaking population (Jay, 2009; Jay & Jay, 2013; Jay & Jay, 2015; Van Lacker & Cummings, 1999). This poses a problem since taboos are inherently defined by their sociocultural background, which is limited in most small studies, which in turn leads to a constrained description of taboo words (Sulpizio et al., 2024).
We collected, categorized, and linguistically analysed Slovenian taboo words and collected their ratings of different psycholinguistic variables for an international project. We found that the inventory of Slovenian taboo words is similar to already collected taboo words in the literature (Gerčar, 2022; Jakop, 2012; Nežmah, 2009). The most frequent taboo words also occur in a similar form and with a similar meaning in other neighbouring languages and English. These words can also refer to various semantic categories as the connotations evolve with time. Additionally, we also found that the most frequent taboo words refer to sexual organs, insults, and slurs.
Subsequently, I gathered ratings for different psycholinguistic variables of taboo words, namely age of acquisition, concreteness, arousal, valency, tabooness and offensiveness. The results unveiled intriguing correlations between these variables, which indicate a tendency to acquire the most tabooed and the most arousing words later in life, as well as heightened arousal of tabooed and offensive words. Negative correlations, on the other hand, indicate that tabooed and offensive words are not pleasant, that we acquire concrete, unpleasant and uncommon words later in life, and that the frequency of tabooed and offensive words diminishes in the corpus.
We hope that our findings will contribute to a better understanding and definition of Slovenian taboo words. Additionally, the collected data can serve as an excellent starting point for further research in the field of psycholinguistics.
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