Semiotics and Sensory Sciences: Meaning Between Texts and Numbers

This chapter will focus on the actual and potential contribution of semiotics to sensory studies, mainly in the analysis of verbal language to describe perception. The need to ‘objectify the unobservable subjectivity’ has been highlighted, gaining access to these individual perceptions by considering the practices in which they are situated (the context). After a quick review of the main steps characterizing the descriptive analysis and its implications in terms of semantic and semiotic research, this chapter will focus on other methods developed for application with consumers without a preliminary training stage, such as the repertory grid method and the free sorting task. EmoSemio, a method originally developed with the contribution of semiotic analysis to investigate consumer emotions elicited by foods and other products, will then be presented. Lastly, the problem of the analysis of open-ended questions and the study of the relationships between information gathered via textual responses and information collected in a quantitative format (forced choice questions, physiological measures, hedonics and so on) will be discussed.