Revisiting the relation between language and cognition: A Cross-cultural Study with odors

Abstract

We investigated the relationship between odor codability and odor memory representation in three cultural groups: French, American, and Vietnamese. In a first experiment, we asked participants from the three cultures to identify twice a set of 40 common odorants. From this task, we computed the codability of each of the 40 odorants. In a second experiment, we asked another group of participants from each culture to perform a yes/no recognition task on the same set of odorants. Results from Experiment 1 suggest that odor codability (1) is a meaningful dimension because some odors are more codable than others within a culture, (2) is equivalently measurable by several inter- and intrapersonal agreement indices, and (3) varies between cultures as a function of both the olfactory environment and language structure. Results from Experiment 2 show that the French codability scores predict recognition memory performance in all three cultures but that the American and Vietnamese codability scores predict none of the recognition performances.