• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.493-502
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• 2013

The purpose of this study was to find out the adjective scales, which will be used in the qualitative sensory evaluation of taste, by collecting and analyzing adjectives of expressing taste of Korean language. For the purpose, we rated the mutual similarities among selected 92 adjectives which include the sense of taste, texture, smell and temperature from foods, and then carried out factor analysis and clustering analysis by using correlation based on the similarities. According to the factor analysis there are more than 10 important factors involved in the linguistic representation of taste including food temperature, texture and smell as well as taste. Also, from the cluster analysis, we found that the adjectives can be clustered with groups of the adjectives representing general taste, negative taste, texture and temperature of food. In addition we analyzed the correlation between the adjectives to represent the generic preference of taste and the adjectives to express individual factors of the preferences that are resulted from cluster analysis. The analysis results could show that we need to restrict the type of foods to find out the meaningful limited number of sensory adjective scales for taste in the future.