Wednesday 16 December 2015

Study Finds People Who Curse A Lot Have A Broader Vocabulary

You might think people who use the "F" word on a regular basis are lacking in a broader vocabulary to use, however science has now proved this to be wrong. 

According to a scientific study, people who curse a lot actually have a bigger vocabulary than those who don't.

 


If you tend to curse a lot, someone, somewhere along the way may have accused you of being less intelligent, but that has turned out to be basically incorrect. If you use all the wrong and taboo words, inserting the "F" word and other expletives into your conversation on a regular basis, a new study has shown you are likely to have a much richer vocabulary than those who don't utter a foul phrase.



Stephen Fry once memorably said, "The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or a lack of verbal interest is just f*cking lunatic." Hear his words of wisdom in the video included at the end of this article.

And it turns out he is right. Anyone with a good repertoire of curse words isn't lacking in better words to express themselves and usually has a far broader vocabulary.

A study was run by psychologists Kristin Jay and Timothy Jay of Marist College and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and came up with the hypothesis that people with a healthy selection of curse words on hand are actually more likely to have a great overall language fluency available to them too.

According to the New York Daily News, in the first part of their study, the team got together 43 participants, consisting of 30 women and 13 men aged between 18 and 22 years. They asked the participants to rattle off as many curse words as they could in 60 seconds.

The next part of the test saw the participants reciting as many animal names as they could think of in 60 seconds. The researchers then used the animal names recited by each person as an indication of their overall vocabulary and interest in language.

Participants were allowed to use any normal American English curse word or offensive phrase and the group ended up with a total of 533 curse words and phrases, including some more obscure and flowery phrases like "ass pirate" and "cum dumpster."

The people involved in the study were also submitted to some standardized verbal fluency tests, or FAS tasks as they are known. These are a kind of psychological test where participants are required to say as many words from a particular category as possible within a given space of time (usually 60 seconds), much like the curse words test.

The researchers ran a second experiment in which another 49 participants, consisting of 34 women and 15 men this time, aged between 18 and 22 years. In a similar way, the group was asked to write down as many curse words and animal names as they could, starting with the letter "A." There were also FAS tasks to perform to assess the participants overall language fluency.



The results of the research have been published in the journal Language Sciences and titled: "Taboo word fluency and knowledge of slurs and general pejoratives: deconstructing the poverty-of-vocabulary myth."
The study showed that the more expressive curse words were generated at a higher rate than mere slurs and that there was very little difference between what the male and female participants came up with.

The report read: "[C]onsistent with findings that do not show a sex difference in taboo lexicon size, no overall sex difference in taboo word generation was obtained." So it seems the ladies can keep up quite nicely with the men.

The research also found that a "voluminous taboo lexicon may better be considered an indicator of healthy verbal abilities rather than a cover for their deficiencies."
"Speakers who use taboo words understand their general expressive content as well as nuanced distinctions that must be drawn to use slurs appropriately. The ability to make nuanced distinctions indicates the presence of more rather than less linguistic knowledge, as implied by the POV [Poverty of Vocabulary] view."
So there you go, don't hold back and just curse away. Admittedly the study did use a small sample size with a limited age group involved, so more research into cursing as related to vocabulary is probably required to fully confirm the results.

Besides the larger vocabulary, according to a recent tweet -- and while not officially confirmed -- it turns out cursing could even help when inflicted with pain. What is the first word that comes to your mouth if you, for instance, accidentally hit your thumb with a hammer?



[Photo via Flickr by Chris Goldberg/CC BY-NC 2.0]
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