Four studies investigated the hypothesis that there are salient areas of the color space (here called "focal colors") which are universally the most linguistically "codable" and the most easily remembered. Experiment I completed previous location of these focal colors on the dimensions of hue, value, and saturation. In Exp. II, speakers of 23 different languages named a sample of focal and nonfocal colors. In Exp. Ill, 20 English speakers and 21 New Guinea Dani, speakers of a language which lacks hue names, remembered and recognized focal and nonfocal colors. In Exp. IV, 19 Dani learned names for focal and nonfocal colors in a paired-associates task. The results were that focal colors were given the shortest names and named most rapidly across languages, were the most accurately recognized both by English and Dani speakers, and could be paired with names with fewest errors. On the basis of these findings, linguistically causal interpretations of earlier languagecognition studies using color were challenged.

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Focal colors are those areas of the color space previously found (u^ing adult subjects) to be the most exemplary of basic color names in m|any different languages. The present research tested a possible developmental basis for such universality; the hypothesis was that focal colors were rnore "salient" than nonfocal colors for young children and were the areai to which color names initially became attached. In Experiment I, twenty-four 3-year-olds picked any color they wished from sets of focal and nonfpcal colors to "show to the experimenter." In Experiment II, twenty 4-year-plds tried to pick colors that matched focal and nonfocal color samples. In Experiment III, twenty-seven 3-4-year-olds chose colors to represent qach basic color name from arrays containing focal and nonfocal example^ of the color. Focal colors were more frequently "shown to the experimentjer," more accurately matched, and more frequently chosen to represent j the color name than were nonfocal colors. Implications for the learning of semantic reference were discussed.

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