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

In brain and behavior, 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.