It turns out that the subjects of those 30 years of experiments were mostly English-speaking. Indeed, English speakers find it easy to identify the common color in milk and jasmine flowers ("white") but not the common scent in, say, bat droppings and the leaf of ginger root. When the research team presented what should have been familiar scents to Americans — cinnamon, turpentine, lemon, rose and so forth — they were terrible at naming them. Americans, they wrote, said things like this when presented with the cinnamon scratch-and-sniff card: "I don't know how to say that, sweet, yeah; I have tasted that gum like Big Red or something tastes like, what do I want to say? I can't get the word. Jesus it's like that gum smell like something like Big Red. Can I say that? O.K. Big Red, Big Red gum."

其实在30年来的这些实验中，受试者大多都讲英语。确实，讲英语的人容易识别牛奶和茉莉花均会呈现的颜色（“白色”），但却很难识别同样的气味，比如蝙蝠粪便和姜叶的共有气味。当研究小组使用美国人本应熟悉的一些气味时，比如肉桂、松脂、柠檬和玫瑰等等，却发现他们在指认这些气味时表现糟糕。研究者写道，闻到肉桂味的刮刮卡时，美国人会说：“我不知道怎么讲，这个很香甜，恩；我以前吃过这种味道的口香糖，比如大红牌(Big Red)，或者有这个味道的什么东西，我想说什么来着？我想不起那个词了。天啊，就好像口香糖，有点像大红牌的。我能那么说吗？好吧，就是大红牌，大红牌口香糖。”

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