Color Cognition and Language

[Language and Thought "again":http://semantics-online.org/2003/11/languageandthought]

An article in this week’s New York Times Magazine deals with the old question of “whether the color words one’s language has influences one’s color perception”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30CRASH.html?ex=1385528400&en=176717064a393181&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND.

bq. The world clearly has many shades of color meaning. Literary Welsh has no words that correspond with green, blue, gray or brown in English, but it uses others that English speakers don’t (including one that covers part of green, part of gray and the whole of our blue). Hungarian has two words for what we call red; Navajo, a single word for blue and green but two words for black. Ancient Greek’s emphases on variables like luminosity (as opposed to just hue) led some scholars to wonder seriously whether the culture at large was colorblind.

After summarizing Rosch’s studies from the sixties, two newer findings are reported. I provide some links for follow-up (shouldn’t the Times do that themselves?):

bq. “Debi Roberson, Ian Davies and Jules Davidoff … examined the hunter-gatherer Berinmo tribe of Papua, New Guinea, a people with five basic color terms who don’t distinguish blue from green. … In essence, they found that the Berinmo handled their nol-wor differences better than their blue v. green (while it was vice versa for English speakers). … ‘These results,’ Davidoff and his colleagues contended, ‘indicate that categorical perception occurs, but only for speakers of the language that marks the categorical distinction, which is consistent with the linguistic relativity hypothesis.’”

Even though one of their more prominent articles appeared in Nature and thus shouldn’t be freely available, I did find a link to a “pdf-file”:http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/rgoldsto/perlearn/berinmo.pdf. Debi Roberson’s “homepage”:http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/psychology/CLIENTS/debiRoberson/debiRoberson.html includes links to newer articles, including a 2003 one entitled “Color categories are culturally diverse in cognition as well as in language”.

bq. “[I]n findings presented in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2003, [Paul] Kay reported conducting statistical tests on color-naming data from more than 100 languages in both industrial and nonindustrialized societies and concluded that ’strong universal tendencies in color naming exist across both.’”

Paul Kay’s “homepage”:http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/ contains many relevant links, including an earlier reply to the Berinmo work, “Color Categories are Not Arbitrary”, and a link to the “World Color Survey”:http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/. The PNAS article is not freely available.

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