The browser you are using is not supported by this website. All versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported, either by us or Microsoft (read more here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support).

Please use a modern browser to fully experience our website, such as the newest versions of Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari etc.

Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language

På svenska

Author

Summary, in English

From Plato to Pinker there has been the common belief that the experience of a smell is impossible to put into words. Decades of studies have confirmed this observation. But the studies to date have focused on participants from urbanized Western societies. Cross-cultural research suggests that there may be other cultures where odors play a larger role. The Jahai of the Malay Peninsula are one such group. We tested whether Jahai speakers could name smells as easily as colors in comparison to a matched English group. Using a free naming task we show on three different measures that Jahai speakers find it as easy to name odors as colors, whereas English speakers struggle with odor naming. Our findings show that the long-held assumption that people are bad at naming smells is not universally true. Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language.

Publishing year

2014

Language

English

Pages

266-270

Publication/Series

Cognition

Volume

130

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Elsevier

Topic

  • General Language Studies and Linguistics

Status

Published

Project

  • Language, cognition and landscape: understanding cross-cultural and individual variation in geographical ontology

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0010-0277