Les mots évoquent-ils des saveurs ? Une comparaison entre étudiants de France, du Vietnam et des USA

Abstract

Do words evoke taste feelings? A comparison between French, American and Vietnamese students.French students (150), American students (150) and Vietnamese students (180) participated in two successive tests to study whether certain words would elicite taste evocations. The first test was a free association test: Subjects had to write down on a sheet of paper what came spontaneously to their mind when reading a given word. The second test was a test of directed association: Subjects had to estimate numerically the association between a series of words and each of the four tastes: sweet, sour, salt and bitter. The results show considerable differences between the three groups of subjects, even though the general structural organization of the four tastes is somewhat similar for all groups. For example, the word strawberry is associated only very slightly with the taste sweet for French subjects whereas it is associated very strongly with sweet for American subjects: it obtains a score comparable with the word honey. For Vietnamese subjects, this word is also associated strongly with sweet, but even more with acid. These results can be explained by differences in both food behavior and life experience. The results also can explain why certain interactions between odors and tastes appear in one culture but not in another.

Taste–odour interactions in sweet taste perception

“…Whereas the association between strawberry and sweet is very frequent in American food (milk shake, ice cream, yogurts), it is less frequent in French food. This was confirmed in the free association task carried out by Sauvageot et al (2000): For French subjects, strawberry is more often associated with a sour taste or a red colour than with a sweet taste as it is for American subjects.…”

“…To evaluate if the different concepts used in the literature tapped the same aspect of the relationship between odorant and tastant, Nguyen (2000) asked four groups of participants to rate the harmony, the congruency, the similarity and the smelled taste of four mixtures. The four mixtures were chosen based on a free association task whose goal was to evaluate the cognitive association between odours and tastes (Sauvageot, Nguyen, Valentin, 2000). Two of them were associated: sucrose-vanilla and acid-lemon.…”

Saltiness Enhancement by Savory Aroma Compounds

“…A subgroup of experienced and trained panelists appeared insensitive and were able to discriminate between the aroma and the sweet taste (Bingham and others 1990; Hort and Hollowood 2004). This indicates that the cross‐modal interactions to a large extent are not “hard‐wired” but rather based on associations formed in previous encounters (Dalton and others 2000; Prescott 2004) and influenced by cultural background (Sauvageot and others 2000). The use of trained assessors, due to their analytic attention (the allocation of attention to the individual attributes during conditioning), therefore, may underestimate the effects aroma will have on the taste perceived by naive consumers.…”

Potenciación de sensaciones gustativas inducidas por el olor en alimentos para adultos mexicanos con peso normal y obesos

“…Moreover, for French subjects, strawberry is more often associated with a sour taste or a red colour than with a sweet taste as it is for American subjects (Sauvageot et al 2000). The association between strawberry and sweet is very frequent in American food (milk shake, ice cream, yogurts), it is less frequent in French food.…”