Linguistic features of fragrances: The role of grammatical gender and gender associations

Abstract

Odors are often difficult to identify and name, which leaves them vulnerable to the influence of language. The present study tests the boundaries of the effect of language on odor cognition by examining the effect of grammatical gender. We presented participants with male and female fragrances paired with descriptions of masculine or feminine grammatical gender. In Experiment 1 we found that memory for fragrances was enhanced when the grammatical gender of a fragrance description matched the gender of the fragrance. In Experiment 2 we found memory for fragrances was affected by both grammatical gender and gender associations in fragrance descriptions – recognition memory for odors was higher when the gender was incongruent. In sum, we demonstrated that even subtle aspects of language can affect odor cognition. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.3758/s13414-019-01729-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Wine experts’ recognition of wine odors is not verbally mediated.

“…Similarly, Poupon et al (2019) found that within 2 months of training, student sommeliers had improved odor naming abilities, but showed no corresponding improvement in odor memory, suggesting these two expert skills are unrelated. Evidence suggests that mental simulation of odor—automatically activating olfactory representations during language comprehension—is difficult (Speed & Majid, 2018; Speed & Majid, 2019b). Evidence also indicates that conscious odor images—that is, an active odor representation without the presence of the actual odor—are particularly difficult to evoke from language (Stevenson & Case, 2005; Stevenson, Case, & Mahmut, 2007; Stevenson & Mahmut, 2013), possibly more difficult than imagery in other modalities (cf., Arshamian & Larsson, 2014; Arshamian, Olofsson, Jönsson, & Larsson, 2008).…”

Classifier categories reflect but do not affect conceptual organization.

“…For example, when asked to describe an object, Spanish and German speakers are more likely to ascribe stereotypically male qualities to objects with masculine grammatical gender, and stereotypically female qualities to objects with feminine grammatical gender (Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Phillips, 2003; but see Mickan, Schiefke, & Stefanowitsch, 2014). Grammatical gender can even affect the way people remember complex fragrances: fragrances are remembered better when the grammatical gender of ingredients in the fragrance match the gender of the person the fragrance is marketed towards (Speed & Majid, 2019).…”

Tasty words: Using frame semantics to enhance consumer liking of potato chips and apples

“…Studies across a number of different disciplines such as chemoreception (e.g., Bensafi, Rinck, Schaal, & Rouby, 2007;White & Prescott, 2007), food science (e.g., Soufflet, Calonnier, & Dacremont, 2004;Zampini, Sanabria, Phillips, & Spence, 2007), psychology (e.g., Raudenbush, Meyer, Eppich, Corley, & Petterson, 2002;Ren, Tan, Arriaga, & Chan, 2015), and consumer research (e.g., Lowrey, Lerman, & Luna, 2007;Lowrey & Shrum, 2007) have shown that congruent multisensory experience is preferred over incongruent multisensory experience. Studies involving recall tests and identification tasks, for example, show that congruent stimuli are more memorable (e.g., Preziosi & Coane, 2017;Speed & Majid, 2019) and more recognizable (e.g., Lupyan & Ward, 2013;Reiner, Hetch, Helevy, & Furman, 2006) than incongruent stimuli. Furthermore, visual attention is enhanced through congruent stimuli such as sounds (e.g., Dolscheid, Hunnius, Casasanto, & Majid, 2014;Knoeferle, Knoeferle, Velasco, & Spence, 2016) and odors (e.g., Robinson, Mattingley, & Reinhard, 2013;Seo, Roidl, Müller, & Negoias, 2010).…”