No abstract

No abstract

A procedure is described whereby the subset of Munsell colors of maximum chroma, which has been used by anthropologists to study color naming since Berlin and Kay in 1969, can be specified in the L,j,g coordinate system developed more recently by the Uniform Color Scales Committee of the Optical Society of America. The latter permits a meaningful specification of the centroid location of colors named by each basic term. The procedure is validated by comparing centroids obtained from six subjects who named samples of both the Munsell and OSA sets, and its usefulness is illustrated by comparing data from a four‐year old who named only OSA samples and four‐ and two‐year‐olds who named only Munsell colors.

To name colors, Tarahumara speakers use basic color terms carrying obligatory modifiers. The modifiers specify the grade of membership of a color stimulus in a color category. The internal structure of color categories is inferred from modifiers and from focal and mapping tasks. Some categories, though named by a single basic color term, have disjunctions in internal structure corresponding to separate categories predicted at later evolutionary stages, interinformant variation suggests that Tarahumara is in the process of evolving from one evolutionary stage to another. [cognitive anthropology, color, evolution, category structure, Tarahumara]

Shuswap speakers use one color term to name both pure yellow and pure green. The yellow‐with‐green category is not part of Berlin and Kay's empirically established sequence of basic color‐category evolution, nor does it square with neurological facts that might explain the sequence. Although the category is rare throughout the world, it is widely diffused in the Pacific Northwest. Here diverse languages accepted the concept that yellow and green should be categorized under one name, but they accommodated the innovation by distinct cognitive strategies and they named it with unrelated terms.