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Chemical Senses 2005 30(1):37-49; doi:10.1093/chemse/bjh255
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Chemical Senses vol. 30 no. 1 © Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved.

Semantic, Typicality and Odor Representation: A Cross-cultural Study

C. Chrea1, D. Valentin1,2, C. Sulmont-Rossé3, D. Hoang Nguyen4 and H. Abdi5

1 Centre des Sciences du Goût, UMR 51–70, Dijon, France, 2 University of Bourgogne, Dijon, France, 3 Unité Mixte de Recherche sur les Arômes, INRA-ENESAD, Dijon, France, 4 University of Technology of Ho Chi Minh, HCM City, Vietnam and 5 The University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX, USA

Correspondence to be sent to: Christelle Chrea, Centre des Sciences du Gôut, UMR 51–70, 15 rue Hugues Picardet, 21000 Dijon, France. E-mail: chrea{at}cesg.cnrs.fr

This study investigated odor-category organization in three cultures by evaluating (i) the relationship between linguistic and perceptual categorization and (ii) the existence of an internal structure of odor categories. In the first experiment, three groups of 30 participants from American, French and Vietnamese cultures performed a sorting task. The first group sorted 40 odorants on the basis of odor similarity, the second group sorted 40 odor names on the basis of name similarity and the last group sorted 40 odor names on the basis of imagined odor similarity. Results showed that odor categorization was based on perceptual or conceptual similarity and was in part independent of word and imagined categorizations. In the second experiment, another group of 30 participants from each culture rated the typicality of the odorants for 11 odor categories. Results showed that some odorants were rated as more typical than others. Moreover, the typicality gradient predicted the odor space obtained in the odor sorting task in a consensual way among the three cultures. These results suggest that, as for other categories, odor categories are based on perceptual similarities rather than on semantic cues. Moreover odor-category structure might have a core representation which might be common to different cultures with boundaries which might be more culturally dependent.

Key words: categorization, culture, linguistic, olfaction, typicality gradient


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