The smells we know and love: variation in codability and description strategy

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe English lexicon is quite impoverished in capturing the perceptual detail of odour qualities. To make up for the lack of smell vocabulary, speakers will often resort to source-based descriptions, a strategy that likens smells to real-world reference points, like ‘mint’. This study examines the instances when Australian English speakers use particular communicative strategies, to explore whether cultural or cognitive influences allow for the easier abstraction of odour qualities. This study combines (1) an odour description task, and (2) a similarity-based sorting task. The results of (1) show that the communicative preferences for describing smells are indeed reliant on source-based descriptions, and the results of (2) show that conceptualisation of odours is primarily based on hedonic valence, and secondarily on salient scents. By combining these results, I find that the communicative preferences vary depending on the conceptualisations of a scent. Scents judged as pleasant receive relatively more abstract descriptions, like ‘sweet’, and show a higher degree of agreement, and the source-based descriptions are particularly frequent among culturally salient scents.