Taste and smell words form an affectively loaded and emotionally flexible part of the English lexicon

ABSTRACT

In brain and behaviour, gustation, and olfaction are closely linked to emotional processing. This paper shows that similarly, words associated with taste and smell, such as “pungent” and “delicious”, are on average more emotionally valenced than words associated with the other senses, such as “beige” (visual) and “echoing” (auditory). Moreover, taste and smell words occur more frequently in emotionally valenced phrases, for example, “fragrant” modifies more emotionally valenced nouns (“fragrant kiss”) than the visual adjective “yellow” (“yellow house”). It is argued that taste and smell words form an affectively loaded part of the English lexicon. Taste and smell words are also shown to be more emotionally flexible in that words such as “sweet” can be combined with both good and bad nouns (“sweet delight” versus “sweet disaster”), much more so than is the case for sensory words for the other modalities. The paper discusses implications for theories of embodied language understanding.

KEYWORDS:

• Embodied cognition
• modality-specific processing
• sensory modalities
• emotional language
• valence

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Bryan Kerster for helping out with setting up COCA as an SQL database. Thanks to Marcus Perlman, Teenie Matlock, Dermot Lynott, Diane Pecher, René Zeelenberg, Clive Winter and Christiane Schmitt for helpful feedback and suggestions. This paper contains elements from Bodo Winter’s Ph.D. dissertation “The Sensory Structure of the English Lexicon”.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Verbs were chosen that were above the median word frequency from the American English SUBTLEX subtitle corpus (Brysbaert & New, 2009).