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Previous investigators have argued that basic color categories are structured in terms of a universal focal area with varying boundaries. In the present study two developmental implications were investigated: (a) that foci for color categories become established and are stabilized earlier than boundaries and (b) that focal judgments are always more stable than boundary judgments. A total of 20 kindergarteners, 40 third graders, and 40 adults served in three color designation experiments modeled after those of Berlin and Kay. Means and variances of focal and boundary judgments for the eight basic chromatic terms were determined for the three groups. In general, both hypotheses were supported.Recently, much research has established that color is not a domain which languages partition arbitrarily into various categories. Berlin and Kay (1969) have shown that there exist a maximum of 11 basic color categories, each defined by a focal region, or group of best examples. The focal region for each category is remarkably similar for all languages which encode, or have a term for, the particular category. Rosch (Heider, 1971(Heider, , 1972Rosch, 1973) has shown that these focal regions have perceptual-cognitive distinctiveness. In tests of recognition memory, both American subjects and Dani subjects (members of a stone-age culture in Indonesian New Guinea, who have color terms only for light and dark) perform more accurately on focal colors than on others. In

The sophisticated-guessing theory of the word-frequency effect, which Broadbent rejects in proposing his own new theory, in fact accounts for the data of word-frequency-effect experiments better than does Broadbent's theory.

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