The Semantic Organization of the English Odor Vocabulary

A Rose by Another Name? Odor Misnaming is Associated with Linguistic Properties

Naming common odors is a surprisingly difficult task: Odors are frequently misnamed. Little is known about the linguistic properties of odor misnamings. We test whether odor misnamings of old adults carry information about olfactory perception and its connection to lexical-semantic processing. We analyze the olfactory-semantic content of odor source naming failures in a large sample of older adults in Sweden (n = 2479; age 58-100 years). We investigate whether linguistic factors and semantic proximity to the target odor name predict how odors are misnamed, and how these factors relate to overall odor identification performance. We also explore the primary semantic dimensions along which misnamings are distributed. We find that odor misnamings consist of surprisingly many vague and unspecific terms, such as category names (e.g., fruit) or abstract or evaluative terms (e.g., sweet). Odor misnamings are often strongly associated with the correct name, capturing properties such as its category or other abstract features. People are also biased toward misnaming odors with high-frequency terms that are associated with olfaction or gustation. Linguistic properties of odor misnamings and their semantic proximity to the target odor name predict odor identification performance, suggesting that linguistic processing facilitates odor identification. Further, odor misnamings constitute an olfactory-semantic space that is similar to the olfactory vocabulary of English. This space is primarily differentiated along pleasantness, edibility, and concreteness dimensions. Odor naming failures thus contain plenty of information about semantic odor knowledge.

Demystifying wine expertise through the lens of imagination: Descriptions and imagery vividness across sensory modalities

For most untrained novices, talking about wine or imagining the smells and flavours of wine is difficult. Wine experts, on the other hand, have been found to have better imagery for wine, and are also more proficient in describing wine. Some scholars have suggested that imagery and language are based on similar underlying processes, but no conclusive evidence has been found regarding mental imagery and language production. In this study, we examined the relationship between imagery and language use in both novices and experts. In an online experiment, wine experts and novices were asked to imagine the colour, smell, taste and mouthfeel of wines in different situations, and were asked to rate the vividness of the imagined experience as well as describe it with words. The results show that experts differ from novices on a number of linguistic measures when describing wine, including the number of words used, the type of words used, the concreteness of those words, and the adjective to noun ratio. Similarly, imagery for wine was more vivid in wine experts compared to novices in the modalities of smell, taste, and mouthfeel, in alignment with previous work. Surprisingly, we found that no single linguistic variable significantly predicted the reported vividness of wine imagery, neither in experts nor in novices. However, the linguistic model predicted imagery vividness better using data from experts compared to novices. Taken together, these findings underscore that imagery and language are different facets of wine cognition.

Odor identification errors reveal cognitive aspects of age-associated smell loss

Human olfaction can be extraordinarily sensitive, and its most common assessment method is odor identification (OID), where everyday odors are matched to word labels in a multiple-choice format. However, many older persons are unable to identify familiar odors, a deficit that is associated with the risk of future dementia and mortality. The underlying processes subserving OID in older adults are poorly understood. Here, we analyzed error patterns in OID to test whether errors could be explained by perceptual and/or semantic similarities among the response alternatives. We investigated the OID response patterns in a large, population-based sample of older adults in Sweden (n = 2479; age 60-100 years). Olfaction was assessed by a 'Sniffin ́ TOM OID test with 16 odors; each trial involved matching a target odor to a correct label among three distractors. We analyzed the pattern of misidentifications, and the results showed that some distractors were more frequently selected than others, suggesting cognitive or perceptual factors may be present. Relatedly, we conducted a large online survey of older adults (n = 959, age 60-90 years) who were asked to imagine and rate the perceptual similarity of the target odors and the three corresponding distractors (e.g. "How similar are these smells: apple and mint?"). We then used data from the Swedish web corpus and the Word2Vec neural network algorithm to quantify the semantic association strength between the labels of each target odor and its three distractors. These data sources were used to predict odor identification errors. We found that the error patterns were partly explained by both the semantic similarity between target-distractor pairs, and the imagined perceptual similarity of the target-distractor pair. Both factors had, however, a diminished prediction in older ages, as responses became gradually less systematic. In sum, our results suggest that OID tests not only reflect olfactory perception, but also likely involve the mental processing of odor-semantic associations. This may be the reason why these tests are useful in predicting dementia onset. Our insights into olfactory-language interactions could be harnessed to develop new olfactory tests that are tailored for specific clinical purposes.