Neural Mechanisms for Monitoring and Halting of Spoken Word Production.

During conversation, speakers monitor their own and others' output so they can alter their production adaptively, including halting it if needed. We investigated the neural mechanisms of monitoring and halting in spoken word production by employing a modified stop signal task during fMRI. Healthy participants named target pictures and withheld their naming response when presented with infrequent auditory words as stop signals.

The neurobiology of taboo language processing: fMRI evidence during spoken word production.

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.

The locus of taboo context effects in picture naming.

Speakers respond more slowly when naming pictures presented with taboo (i.e., offensive/embarrassing) than with neutral distractor words in the picture-word interference paradigm.