Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
Brain Lang. 2022 Dec;235:105200. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2022.105200. Epub 2022 Nov 5.
Whether language is grounded in action and perception has been a key question in cognitive science, yet little attention has been given to the sense of smell. We directly test whether smell is necessary for comprehension of odor language, by comparing language processing in a group of participants with no sense of smell (anosmics) to a group of control participants. We found no evidence for a difference in online comprehension of odor and taste language between anosmics and controls using a lexical decision task and a semantic similarity judgment task, suggesting olfaction is not critical to the comprehension of odor language. Contrary to predictions, anosmics were better at remembering odor words, and rated odor and taste words as more positively valenced than control participants. This study finds no detriment to odor language after losing the sense of smell, supporting the proposal that odor language is not grounded in odor perception.
语言是否基于动作和感知一直是认知科学的一个关键问题，但很少有人关注嗅觉。我们通过比较一组没有嗅觉的参与者（嗅觉缺失者）和一组对照组的语言处理，直接测试嗅觉是否对气味语言的理解是必要的。我们使用词汇判断任务和语义相似性判断任务发现，嗅觉缺失者和对照组在在线理解气味和味道语言方面没有差异，这表明嗅觉对于理解气味语言不是至关重要的。与预测相反，嗅觉缺失者在记忆气味词汇方面表现更好，并且比对照组参与者对气味和味道词汇的评价更为积极。这项研究发现，失去嗅觉后不会对气味语言造成损害，这支持了气味语言不是基于嗅觉感知的观点。
