Research on language and olfaction presents a paradox. Language appears to support the formation of odor categories, yet it can also hinder odor recognition through verbal interference, highlighting that different olfactory processes get affected in distinct ways. The question, then, is not about whether language and odor processing in humans are inevitably linked, but about understanding the circumstances under which language either promotes or hinders olfactory processing, particularly in the domains of odor categorization and memory. To unmask the nature of this delicate balance, this article reviews empirical studies that point to a verbal enhancement of forming new odor categories and contextualizes it alongside experimental outcomes showing how odor memories can get verbally skewed. Findings from both angles are nested within prominent theories, including attribute differentiation, dual coding, ad hoc cognition and attentional tuning. The research reviewed here sits at the crossroads of language and olfaction. It offers fresh insights into how language scaffolds the organization of the mind, and it also outlines promising directions for future research. The main aim is to bring together two contrasting strands of research to investigate how language both facilitates and disrupts olfactory processing. The designs of studies in this article were inspired by Asifa Majid's outstanding contributions to cognitive science and honor her dedication to community building, particularly in exploring how diverse linguistic and cultural contexts affect olfactory cognition.

Misleading food labels generate powerful expectations that shape both anticipatory sensory judgments and hedonic evaluation, as demonstrated in the classic smoked salmon ice-cream paradigm (Yeomans et al., 2008, FQP). The present study replicates the core effect and broadens the paradigm in three specific ways. First, rather than relying on a single stimulus, we generalised the paradigm across ten food stimuli spanning two opposing flavour trajectories, five Sweet-to-Salty (e.g. Blue-cheese smoothie, Tuna yoghurt) and five Salty-to-Sweet (e.g. Caramel tofu cubes, Chocolate-sauce mashed potato). Second, we examined expectancy-violation effects bidirectionally. Third, we isolated label-based expectations by eliciting pre-taste ratings from written labels alone, without visual cues. Forty Mandarin-dominant participants evaluated all items under three label conditions (Expected, Unexpected, Neutral) in a two-phase procedure, first rating each item from its written label alone and then re-rating it after tasting. In the Sweet-to-Salty direction, misleading labels produced strong anticipatory inflation of sweetness and pleasantness, followed by sharp post-taste declines, accompanied by expectancy-sensitive increases in perceived saltiness. Robust Condition × Time interactions indicated graded re-evaluation under mismatch. In the Salty-to-Sweet direction, expectancy effects were again strongest prior to tasting, particularly for sweetness and saltiness judgments. Sensory experience substantially reduced or reversed these anticipatory divergences, especially under Unexpected labelling, although hedonic re-evaluation was less trajectory-sensitive and some residual differences remained for saltiness. Together, the findings show that linguistic labels alone can establish strong anticipatory priors across multiple food types and flavour trajectories that are then dynamically recalibrated in light of sensory input. The magnitude and symmetry of this reweighting depended on flavour direction and judgement type, indicating that expectancy-driven contrast effects are robust but dimension-specific. By extending the paradigm beyond a single food and incorporating bidirectional trajectories, the study sheds new light on how verbal labels shape flavour perception and consumer evaluation in ways that are consistent with predictive sensory reweighting.

Verbal overshadowing (VO) refers to the phenomenon whereby recognition of a stimulus becomes impaired after it has been verbally described, an effect that has been extensively documented in the visual domain. However, VO in gustatory recognition remains underexplored. This is despite the fact that gustation is lexically more impoverished than vision across many languages, including English and Chinese. The present study reports three experiments examining whether and how verbalisation disrupts gustatory recognition. In Experiment 1, forty native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were randomly assigned either to provide a verbal description of the target juice prior to recognition (n = 20) or to complete a nonverbal filler task (n = 20). Recognition accuracy was significantly lower in the verbalisation group than in the control group, demonstrating a robust VO effect for gustation. Experiment 2 examined whether explicitly alerting participants to the potential for VO would mitigate its effect. Participants in the informed verbalisation condition were warned that their descriptions might not accurately reflect their later gustatory memory. Nonetheless, recognition accuracy remained significantly lower than in the control group, indicating that awareness alone does not attenuate VO. Experiment 3 further tested whether combining VO awareness with explicit instructions to suppress description-based information would reduce the effect. Even under these conditions, participants showed significantly impaired recognition accuracy, suggesting that verbal interference persists despite deliberate attempts to rely solely on sensory memory. Across the three experiments, participants completed two counterbalanced recognition runs, one for a sour and one for a sweet stimulus set, and analyses were conducted after exclusion of participants who failed the gustatory screening criterion. Together, these findings provide convergent evidence that verbalisation reliably impairs gustatory recognition and that neither increased awareness nor deliberate suppression moderates this effect. The results are discussed with reference to four candidate mechanisms, including recoding interference, transfer-inappropriate processing shifts, retrieval-based interference and criterion-shift accounts.

Are words special in shaping how we perceive the world, or can nonverbal cues such as shape, colour or sound activate knowledge about sensory perceptions in similar ways? A growing body of psycholinguistic research suggests that language labels provide a uniquely powerful boost to perception, supporting discrimination, pattern recognition and category learning across complex multisensory input types. This Element surveys recent advances in sensory psycholinguistics, the study of how language influences perception through vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste. It introduces core concepts, reviews landmark experiments across each sensory modality and contextualises innovative methods together with a variety of related measures. Designed for both new and experienced researchers, the Element invites critical reflection on how linguistic cues influence perceptual processing and meaning-making. The five senses are examined in a reversed hierarchical order (smell, taste, touch, hearing, vision) to underscore that commonly assumed sensory hierarchies are neither universal nor cross-culturally uniform.

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue on ad hoc concepts and linguistic relativity. We argue that empirical research on linguistic relativity can be re-interpreted through the lens of ad hoc cognition, a framework originating in Barsalou's (Memory & Cognition, 11, 211-227, 1983) account of goal-derived categories and expanded by Casasanto and Lupyan's (The conceptual mind: New directions in the study of concepts. MIT Press, 2015) proposal that all conceptual representations are context-sensitive constructions. We begin by placing the argument in historical context, outlining how prototype theory and ad hoc categorisation challenge accounts of fixed, feature-based conceptual structure, motivating instead a view of concepts as dynamically assembled in response to situational demands. We then introduce the studies comprising this special issue, which collectively investigate language-thought interactions across diverse perceptual, conceptual and linguistic domains using a wide array of linguistic typologies and experimental methodologies. Across these contributions, a coherent pattern emerges: linguistic effects on cognition are graded rather than categorical, shaped by task demands, memory load, the availability of verbal resources and the experiential histories of speakers. We argue that this perspective reframes the Whorfian question, shifting from a binary 'does language affect thought?' to a systematic investigation of when, how, and to what degree language dynamically modulates conceptual processing.

This study investigated how first-language Sinhala learners of English as a second language (Sinhala-L1–English-L2 learners) acquire and process English reflexive binding, which requires local antecedents unlike Sinhala’s permissive long-distance binding. Fifty-five L2 learners and two control groups (English L1, Sinhala L1; N = 165) completed offline antecedent-selection and online eye-tracked sentence-picture matching tasks. Offline, learners selected the structurally accessible antecedent above chance across conditions, most robustly in c-command and only marginally in finite and non-finite contexts, indicating developing sensitivity to English locality constraints rather than wholesale L1 transfer. Online, above-chance performance emerged only in the c-command condition, while finite and non-finite conditions fell to or below chance level. Eye-tracking and reaction-time data further revealed slower, more variable processing and a preference for discourse-prominent antecedents in finite contexts. These findings reveal a nuanced offline-online pattern in L2 processing: developing sensitivity to English locality constraints is not yet consistently deployed during real-time comprehension. The results are consistent with the Shallow Structure Hypothesis and highlight the challenges of applying partially reassembled structural features in real-time processing when L1 and L2 binding domains diverge.

Languages differ in how they encode object–state changes, which in turn can influence how speakers segment dynamic events. English and Mandarin diverge at the lexical level in their use of determiners and verb-satellite constructions, and at the phrasal level in how they represent telicity. This study examined whether such lexical and phrasal differences modulate two types of event segmentation: internal segmentation (detecting interruptions within an unfolding event) and external segmentation (tapping the boundaries of a complete event). In Experiment 1 (N = 30 per group), English and Mandarin speakers described cutting and blending events in real time. Lexically, English speakers highlighted object initial states with determiners, whereas Mandarin speakers emphasized end states with verb-satellite constructions. Phrasally, English speakers more often used telic descriptions for cutting events and atelic descriptions for blending events. In Experiment 2 (N = 64 per group), participants detected interruptions inserted within an unfolding event. English speakers were more accurate at detecting interruptions in the early stages of blending events, while Mandarin speakers were more accurate later on, mirroring their respective lexical biases. In Experiment 3 (N = 20 per group), participants tapped to indicate when a single event started and ended. English speakers marked the end of bounded cutting events faster than Mandarin speakers, consistent with their greater use of telic framing at the phrasal level. Together, these findings suggest that linguistic framing systematically shapes event segmentation at multiple levels, and that different experimental paradigms selectively reveal distinct aspects of events in real time.

Calendar calculations, the process of computing the target day or month, exhibit peculiar differences across languages. In systems like English, calendar labels are largely opaque (Tuesday, August), which invites calculations to rely more heavily on verbal listing. In transparent systems, like Chinese, habitual labeling of calendar terms numerically (Tuesday = Day 2, August = Month 8) facilitates fast numerical operations instead of verbal listing. This study examines the effects that different levels of transparency of the calendar naming system may have on calculations in the speakers’ first and second language. Chinese–English bilinguals were tested alongside English and Chinese controls. Forced-choice calendar calculations (day, month, hour and year) and self-reported strategies were used as tasks to tap into participants’ calculation speed, accuracy and temporal reasoning. In the calculation questions, we manipulated Distance (short/long), Direction (forward/backward), Input (linguistic/numerical) and Boundary (within/across). More complex Month calculations significantly differed across groups while easier day calculations did not. The English group reported reliance on verbal listing while the Chinese and the Bilingual groups preferred numerical reasoning. These findings bring new evidence for linguistic relativity in the form of modulations of calendar processing speed changing as a function of linguistic transparency, input type and task demand.

Language is known to play a crucial role in influencing how humans perceive and categorize sensory stimuli, including odors. This study investigated the impact of linguistic labeling on odor categorization among bilingual participants proficient in Chinese (L1) and English (L2). We hypothesized that L1-like linguistic labels would more robustly propel the learning of new olfactory categories compared to a condition without language, and more familiar labels would better support odor category learning. The analysis focused on comparing learning trajectories and odor categorization performance of four groups, three in which odors were paired with different sets of verbal labels and a control group that categorized odors without any verbal labeling. Following four days of intensive training, the results showed that the groups with verbal labels numerically outperformed the control group, and that the less familiar the labels sounded the more successful categorization became. However, between-group differences did not reach statistical significance. These findings, while not conclusively supporting our hypotheses, provide insights into the complex relationship between linguistic familiarity and odor category formation. The results are nested within Ad Hoc Cognition, highlighting that variations in linguistic familiarity may not induce robust enough contextual changes to differentially affect how odor categories are formed.

We investigate agreement attraction effects in the L2 English of native speakers of Czech, a language that has little-to-no evidence of attraction effects. Our experiments involve two groups of participants. The first group ( N = 415) participated in an L2 English-only experiment, and the second group ( N = 183) participated in both L2 English and L1 Czech versions of the experiment (in a randomized order with a two-week interval). Standard attraction effects were observed in L2 English, contrasting with the absence of such effects in L1 Czech. Our results provide unique evidence that an L2 can significantly attract, even when the L1 does not. However, our results also revealed that the attraction effect in L2 English disappeared when the L1 Czech version was completed first. These findings are discussed in relation to the Unified Competition Model and the effects of L2-induced increases in working memory demands.

Research on first language (L1) attrition typically focuses on immigrant populations in their second language (L2) environment, yet we know comparably little about L1 attrition in the L1 setting. This study used two lexical tasks to test L1 attrition, a time-sensitive word decision task and a video retelling. Chinese teachers of English vs. Chinese teachers of other subjects ( N = 25/group) were recruited at a secondary school in China. The aim was to provide an exploratory basis of the L2 influence on L1 lexical attrition in the L1 environment, both on the level of lexical comprehension and production. Mixed-effects models were used to analyse multiple measures including response accuracy and reaction times in comprehension, and lexical diversity, density, sophistication, and accuracy in production. The results showed Chinese teachers’ L1 lexical attrition in the form of longer response times to high-frequency Chinese words compared to non-English Chinese teachers, and the use of significantly fewer sophisticated words in their retellings. Also, teachers of English were faster and more accurate in decisions about Chinese borrowings from English, suggesting L2-driven influence on their mental lexicon. Considering participants’ background information, analyses showed that increased L2 exposure and frequency of use can predict L1 lexical attrition.

Consensus on the extent to which cross-linguistic differences affect event cognition is currently absent. This is partly because cognitive influences of language have rarely been examined within speakers of different languages in tasks that manipulate the level of visual processing. This study presents a novel combination of a high-level approach upregulating the involvement of language, namely self-paced sentence-video verification, and a low-level visual detection method without language use, namely breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) (Yang et al., 2014). The results point to cross-linguistic effects on event cognition by revealing variations in visual processing patterns of manner and path by English versus Mandarin Chinese speakers. Language specificity was found on both levels of processing. An asymmetry in response speed across tasks highlights an important difference between facilitation of detecting contrasts when recruitment of verbal labels is automatic, versus facilitation of verifying correspondences when labels are overt.

Is negation more difficult to process than affirmation? If it is, does processing negation in a second language (L2) compound the difficulty compared to the first language (L1)? This article addresses the issues of difficulties in processing different types of negation in the L1 and L2 by looking at the differences in the ways in which comprehenders anticipate upcoming visual information during sentence processing. Using a blank-screen paradigm, we recorded eye fixations of Croatian native speakers and Croatian learners of English while they were anticipating matching or mismatching pictures to sentences with various types of negation in L1 (Croatian) and L2 (English). Using a between-group design, we manipulated sentence polarity (affirmative vs. negative), negation type (sentential vs. negative quantifier) within both L1 Croatian and L2 English so that we could observe potential anticipation effects varying as a function of the two predictors. In line with previous studies, affirmation in the L1 was easier to process than negation, and participants were able to anticipate sentence-picture matches in both the L1 and the L2 group. In contrast with our prediction, anticipatory looks did not significantly vary across negation types in Croatian based on the number of structural cues. In L2 English, learners exhibited prediction ability across negation types. These findings go against the view that comprehension in L2 comes with a reduced ability to generate expectations, and they highlight the robustness of mental simulations in both L1 and L2 negation processing.