ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2018
Olfactory language and abstraction across cultures.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Olfactory dysfunction in aging and neurodegenerative diseases.Ageing research reviews · 2021Pooled it
- Self-reported symptom study of COVID-19 chemosensory dysfunction in Malaysia.Scientific reports · 2022Trial
- Extracting prototypes from lexical feature norms for settlement concepts.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Moving, Seeing, Hearing, Smelling and Tasting: How Sensory-Motor Experiences Shape Early Cognitive Development.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Tasting with Feelings: Socioeconomic Differences in Children's Emotional and Sensory Description of Vegetables.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Idiopathic hyposmia as a marker of prodromal Parkinson's disease - a cohort study.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Limonene Selectively Modulates Visual Attention Through P300 Suppression: A Comparative Event-Related Potential Study With Lemon Essential Oil.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- A standardized lexicon of body odor words crafted from 17 countries.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Nature and human well-being: The olfactory pathway.Science advances · 2024Review
- A cross-cultural study of language and cognition: Numeral classifiers and solid object categorization.Memory & cognition · 2023Article
- Olfactory abstraction: a communicative and metacognitive account.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Consensus Paper: Current Perspectives on Abstract Concepts and Future Research Directions.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
- What we talk about when we talk about colors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Olfactory Language: Context Is Everything.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2021Article
- Consequences of Sensory Modality for Perspective-Taking: Comparing Visual, Olfactory and Gustatory Perception.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Olfaction in the Multisensory Processing of Faces: A Narrative Review of the Influence of Human Body Odors.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.