It is widely believed that people are bad at naming odors. This has led researchers to suggest smell representations are simply not accessible to the language centers of the brain. But is this really so? Psychologist Asifa Majid from Radboud University Nijmegen and linguist Niclas Burenhult from Lund University Sweden find new evidence for smell language in the Malay Peninsula. The research appeared online in Cognition.
English speakers struggle to name odors. While there are words such as blue or purple to describe colors, nothing comparable exists to name odors. Even with familiar everyday odors, such as coffee, banana, and chocolate, English speakers only correctly name the smells around 50% of the time. This has led to the conclusion that smells defy words. Majid and Burenhult present new evidence that this is not true in all languages.
Jahai
Majid and Burenhult conducted research with speakers of Jahai, a hunter-gatherer language spoken in the Malay Peninsula. In Jahai there are around a dozen different words to describe different qualities of smell. For example, ltpɨt is used to describe the smell of various flowers and ripe fruit, durian, perfume, soap, Aquillaria wood, bearcat, etc. Cŋɛs, another smell word, is used for the smell of petrol, smoke, bat droppings and bat caves, some species of millipede, root of wild ginger, etc. These terms refer to different odor qualities and are abstract, in the same way that blue and purple are abstract.
Odors and colors
Are Jahai speakers better at naming odors? To test this Majid and Burenhult presented Jahai speakers, and a matched set of English speakers, with the same set of colors and odors to name. Each participant was simply asked to say "What color is this?" or "What odor is this?". Responses were then compared on a number of measures, including length of response, type of response and speaker agreement in names. Majid and Burenhult found that Jahai speakers could name odors with the same conciseness and level of agreement as colors, but English speakers struggled to name odors. Jahai speakers overwhelmingly used abstract Jahai smell words to describe odors, whereas English speakers used mostly source-based descriptions (like a banana) or evaluative descriptions (that's disgusting).
Searching for words
English speakers grapple to describe smells. Their responses for odors were 5 times longer than their responses for colors. This is despite the fact that the smells used in the experiment were familiar to English speakers but not necessarily to the Jahai. For example, English speakers trying to name the smell of cinnamon said it was: spicy, sweet, bayberry, candy, Red Hot, smoky, edible, wine, potpourri, etc.
Studying other cultures
These results question the view that there is a biological limitation for our inability to name smells. Jahai speakers have an elaborate vocabulary for smells that they use with fluency. This means that the inability to name smells is a product of culture and not biology.
Explore further: Researchers getting closer to understanding why odors are so difficult to describe
More information: 'Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language' Cognition, 2014 Feb;130(2):266-70. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.11.004.
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It is widely believed that people are bad at naming odors. This has led researchers to suggest smell representations are simply not accessible to the language centers of the brain. But is this really so? Psychologist Asifa Majid from Radboud University Nijmegen and linguist Niclas Burenhult from Lund University Sweden find new evidence for smell language in the Malay Peninsula. The research appeared online in Cognition.
English speakers struggle to name odors. While there are words such as blue or purple to describe colors, nothing comparable exists to name odors. Even with familiar everyday odors, such as coffee, banana, and chocolate, English speakers only correctly name the smells around 50% of the time. This has led to the conclusion that smells defy words. Majid and Burenhult present new evidence that this is not true in all languages.
Jahai
Majid and Burenhult conducted research with speakers of Jahai, a hunter-gatherer language spoken in the Malay Peninsula. In Jahai there are around a dozen different words to describe different qualities of smell. For example, ltpɨt is used to describe the smell of various flowers and ripe fruit, durian, perfume, soap, Aquillaria wood, bearcat, etc. Cŋɛs, another smell word, is used for the smell of petrol, smoke, bat droppings and bat caves, some species of millipede, root of wild ginger, etc. These terms refer to different odor qualities and are abstract, in the same way that blue and purple are abstract.
Odors and colors
Are Jahai speakers better at naming odors? To test this Majid and Burenhult presented Jahai speakers, and a matched set of English speakers, with the same set of colors and odors to name. Each participant was simply asked to say "What color is this?" or "What odor is this?". Responses were then compared on a number of measures, including length of response, type of response and speaker agreement in names. Majid and Burenhult found that Jahai speakers could name odors with the same conciseness and level of agreement as colors, but English speakers struggled to name odors. Jahai speakers overwhelmingly used abstract Jahai smell words to describe odors, whereas English speakers used mostly source-based descriptions (like a banana) or evaluative descriptions (that's disgusting).
Searching for words
English speakers grapple to describe smells. Their responses for odors were 5 times longer than their responses for colors. This is despite the fact that the smells used in the experiment were familiar to English speakers but not necessarily to the Jahai. For example, English speakers trying to name the smell of cinnamon said it was: spicy, sweet, bayberry, candy, Red Hot, smoky, edible, wine, potpourri, etc.
Studying other cultures
These results question the view that there is a biological limitation for our inability to name smells. Jahai speakers have an elaborate vocabulary for smells that they use with fluency. This means that the inability to name smells is a product of culture and not biology.
Explore further: Researchers getting closer to understanding why odors are so difficult to describe
More information: 'Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language' Cognition, 2014 Feb;130(2):266-70. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.11.004.
Medical Xpress on facebook
Related Stories
Researchers getting closer to understanding why odors are so difficult to describe
(Medical Xpress)—Ask someone to describe something they are looking at, and they will offer words that have evolved to describe seen objects, but ask them to describe odors, and they will almost always ...
Research sheds new light on the hierarchy of the senses
When people converse in their day-to-day lives, they often speak about what they hear, smell, taste or feel. First and foremost, however, they talk about their visual perceptions. This is the conclusion of ...
An odour lexicon: A group of nomadic hunter-gatherers in Thailand have multiple words for smells
"A sweet, flowery and oriental composition of scents with jasmine and May rose absolute" – this is how a well-known cosmetics manufacturer describes one of its most successful women's perfumes. A very sophisticated ...
Researchers identify receptors activated by odors
A group of physiologists led by University of Kentucky's Tim McClintock have identified the receptors activated by two odors using a new method that tracks responses to smells in live mice.
Understanding how neurons shape memories of smells
In a study that helps to deconstruct how olfaction is encoded in the brain, neuroscientists at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a type of neuron that appears to help ...
Recommended for you
Researcher observes active role of auditory neurons
Cells in the brainstem that underlie sound localization, compare signals at the two ears and can pause while doing so. This was shown by researchers at the Laboratory for Auditory Neurophysiology in Leuven, ...
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A team of researchers at the IRCM led by Frédéric Charron, PhD, in collaboration with bioengineers at McGill University, uncovered a new kind of synergy in the development of the nervous system, which explains an important ...
Researchers build brain-machine interface to control prosthetic hand
A research team from the University of Houston has created an algorithm that allowed a man to grasp a bottle and other objects with a prosthetic hand, powered only by his thoughts.
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Memory loss has recently been associated with excessive silencing of genes through a process called methylation. Researchers at the University of Louisville investigated the effects of a diet rich in methionine—an amino ...
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(MedicalXpress)—A team of researchers with the University of Maryland and Mt. Sinai School of Medicine has found that brain regions in female rodents associated with sexual behavior are feminized by repression ...
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