Lexical analysis: an approach to social representations of food

A new technique based on computer multivariate analysis of natural language applied to two corpuses of free associations about "eating", one from an analogic dictionnary, the other from a sample of 2000 French adults who answered an open question (For you, what is "eating well"?) Results show the various dimensions of the representation of "eating". The dictionnary corpus yields a nodal structure of the social representation that can be considered as commonsense knowledge modelling. Results, coherent with the sociological literature, also show affective connotations related to a primitive oral state as described by psychoanalysis. The human corpus yields representational scripts that are weighted within the population and show gender and age effects. This paper was originally presented at the annual scientific meeting of AGEV and European Interdisciplinary Meeting, 1993, Potsdam, Germany. It was also published as a supplement to Ernährungs-Umschau, vol. 42 (1995). pp. 115-120.