Smell - Effability of Smell

Question 1

Vestigial nature of smell

Answer 1

Chemical senses like olfaction deemed vestigial (Pinker, 1997) and deemed hierarchically insignificant (Viberg, 1984), with claims that olfactory unimportance to language means “olfactory abstraction impossible” (Henning, 1916)

Question 2

Ineffable - Lack of basic terms

Answer 2

Berlin and Kay (1969) requirements, with words like “stinky” meeting them, but inherently evaluative and rely on subjective, not objective experiences of speaker (Majid & Burenhult, 2014)

Abundance of source-descriptors in English

Question 3

Ineffable - modality exclusivity scores (Majid, 2021)

Answer 3

Reflects speakers’ experiences of concepts through various perceptual modalities, with English having smell-associated words least common, and in 40,000 words, visual dominant and olfactory least abundant

English speakers exposed to vision-associated words over 200 times more than smell-associated words (Majid, 2021)

Lack of communicative importance

Question 4

Ineffable - Experimental Evidence

Answer 4

Cain (1979) had pps name experientially familiar but visually ambiguous smells, either from endowed labels or self-generation > (1) improvements over trials in endowed labels, but ceiling never reached; (2) self-generation showed only 50% correctness throughout, and ceiling never reached despite feedback

Majid et al (2018) and Majid and Burenhult (2014) showed similar findings to Cain (1979) in more controlled experiment, showing even use of source-descriptors do not correlate with decontextualised source smells being named correctly

Comparison with vision which enjoys quicker, and more consistent and accurate responses in conceptually similar paradigms (Cameron et al., 2016)

Question 5

Reasons for ineffability of smell - Evolution

Answer 5

Vision-smell trade-off suggested, with structural and functional changes that accommodated stereoscopic vision in evolution, reducing olfactory apparatus and subsequent olfactory abilities (Majid, 2021)

Question 6

Reasons for ineffability of smell - Connectivity

Answer 6

Perhaps olfactory and language areas of brain are poorly connected

Perhaps too connected such that primary olfactory cortex interfaces with language regions of the brain, such that olfactory representations remain coarse and unprocessed at point of lexical-semantic integration

Question 7

Reasons for ineffability of smell - Perceptual

Answer 7

Those that argued that olfactory representations are ‘fuzzy’, emphasised by their multi-dimensional nature

Question 8

Reasons for ineffability of smell - Linguistic

Answer 8

If limited vocab for odours and infrequently communicated, insufficient opportunities for child to learn how to discuss odours, supporting by findings that low-frequency odour names (cinnamon) harder to name correctly than high-frequency (coffee), even when controlling familiarity (Huisman & Majid, 2018)

Support from domain-general findings that providing consistent input facilitates reliable and robust category learning (Lupyan et al., 2007)

Suggests causal link between language and olfactory perception and cognition

Question 9

Majid et al (2018) and olfaction

Answer 9

Ineffability findings focused on English, but this is hindering to cognitive science (Blasi et al., 2022) and cross-linguistic evidence needed

20 diverse languages, including sign languages, finding smell to be generally poorly coded in languages, but that hunter-gatherers typically better

Whilst vision generally high codability, no single hierarchy of sense codabilities imposed across languages

Question 10

Effable - Jahai smell terms (Burenhult & Majid, 2011) and Thai smell terms (Majid, 2021)

Answer 10

Just Indo-European languages seem to lack basic smell terms, but this may be documentation gap (or true effect of linguistic development)

Jahai of Malay Peninsula have 12 basic smell terms, all characterised as abstract (hallmark of language; Hockett, 1960) and in accordance with Berlin and Kay (1969)

Thai, an industrialised society with millions of speakers, also has basic vocab

Question 11

Effable - Jahai vs English at odour naming (Majid & Burenhult, 2014)

Answer 11

Jahai and English in colour and odour naming, involving free-naming one-by-one in native language (like self-generation in Cain, 1979), and then calculated agreement in naming each stimulus

Colours Munsell and smells standardised microencapsulated odours (odorant affixed on paper, with something on top that can be scratched to release smell, controlling dose of odour across trials)

Agreement for colour naming much higher than odour naming in English speakers, but no significant differences between two conditions in Jahai speakers

Question 12

Effable - Majid and Kruspe (2018) and Kruspe and Majid (2022)

Answer 12

Teases apart culture and language > Semaq Beri and Semelai live in Malay Peninsula and speak languages similar to Jahai, but Semaq Beri are hunter-gatherers and Semelai are not

Agreement data showed Semelai to behave like English, but Semaq Beri like Jahai, suggesting cultural reasons (hunter-gatherer)

However, Kruspe and Majid (2022) reassessed and showed they have comparable agreement data, meaning it is in fact presence of basic smell vocab that allows odour naming

Question 13

Effable - olfactory abstraction in grammar (Floyd et al., 2018)

Answer 13

Extended beyond lexica to grammaticalization, with nominal classifiers for smells shown to interact with lexical roots to create several basic smell terms in Cha’palaa people of Ecuador

Majid (2021) discusses how grammaticalization of words to affixes often correlated with statistical frequency of communicative use, suggesting smell important in some languages, just not English

Question 14

Explanation for cross-cultural differences in effability of smell - Ecological

Answer 14

Industrialised populations poorer olfactory abilities than those not exposed to ambient air pollution

Odours potentially more relevant in tropical rainforests > limited line of sight, but odours carry over longer distances

However, would predict that arctic environments not conductive to smell lexicons, but evidence that Siberian hunter-gatherers may have elaborate smell language

Question 15

Explanation for cross-cultural differences in effability of smell - Cultural

Answer 15

Divisions of culture that are odoriphobe or odoriphile, meaning claims that odour identification not relevant for humans could at most characterise odoriphobe socieites

Urban-dwellers spend little time engaging with natural environment, but hunter-gatherers mobile and rich ethnobiographical knowledge, being use for animal and plant identification (O’Meara & Majid, 2016), but systematic investigations needed

Question 16

Explanation for cross-cultural differences in effability of smell - Genetic

Answer 16

Carry over 800 olfactory receptors but only half are functioning > IDs in repertoire and expression may affect perception, and study of more than 11,000 Icelanders found olfactory receptor expression correlated with odour naming difficulties

However, groupings of olfactory receptor gene expressions have been too coarse to help explain a more fine-coursed diversity of attested smell language > likely gene-culture co-evolution