Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2018 Aug 5;373(1752):20170139.
doi: 10.1098/rstb.2017.0139.

Olfactory language and abstraction across cultures

Asifa Majid  1   2   3 , Niclas Burenhult  3   4   5 , Marcus Stensmyr  6 , Josje de Valk  7 , Bill S Hansson  8
Affiliations

Olfactory language and abstraction across cultures

Asifa Majid et al. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. .

Abstract

Olfaction presents a particularly interesting arena to explore abstraction in language. Like other abstract domains, such as time, odours can be difficult to conceptualize. An odour cannot be seen or held, it can be difficult to locate in space, and for most people odours are difficult to verbalize. On the other hand, odours give rise to primary sensory experiences. Every time we inhale we are using olfaction to make sense of our environment. We present new experimental data from 30 Jahai hunter-gatherers from the Malay Peninsula and 30 matched Dutch participants from the Netherlands in an odour naming experiment. Participants smelled monomolecular odorants and named odours while reaction times, odour descriptors and facial expressions were measured. We show that while Dutch speakers relied on concrete descriptors, i.e. they referred to odour sources (e.g. smells like lemon), the Jahai used abstract vocabulary to name the same odours (e.g. musty). Despite this differential linguistic categorization, analysis of facial expressions showed that the two groups, nevertheless, had the same initial emotional reactions to odours. Critically, these cross-cultural data present a challenge for how to think about abstraction in language.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.

Keywords: Dutch; Jahai; abstract; culture; language; olfaction.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

We have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
(Top panel) Types of strategies used to describe odours by Jahai and Dutch participants, and (bottom panel) time taken to name odours by language and participant. Jahai speakers use overwhelmingly abstract odour terms and take around 2 s to name odours; Dutch participants use predominantly concrete descriptors and take around 13 s to name odours.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Correspondence analysis plots of (a) odour descriptions (red) and odorants (blue) for Jahai and Dutch and (b) facial expression action units (AUs) by odorants. See table 1 for full description of odorants and table 2 for description of AUs.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Stevenson RJ. 2010. An initial evaluation of the functions of human olfaction. Chem. Senses 35, 3–20. (10.1093/chemse/bjp083) - DOI - PubMed
    1. Keller A. 2014. The evolutionary function of conscious information processing is revealed by its task-dependency in the olfactory system. Front. Psychol. 5, 1–7. (10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00062) - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Richardson L. 2013. Sniffing and smelling. Philos. Stud. 162, 401–419. (10.1007/s11098-011-9774-6) - DOI
    1. Porter J, Craven B, Khan RM, Chang S-J, Kang I, Judkewicz B, Volpe J, Settles G, Sobel N. 2007. Mechanisms of scent-tracking in humans. Nat. Neurosci. 10, 27–29. (10.1038/nn1819) - DOI - PubMed
    1. Yeshurun Y, Sobel N. 2010. An odor is not worth a thousand words: from multidimensional odors to unidimensional odor objects. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 61, 219–241. (10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163639) - DOI - PubMed

Publication types