Color Appearance and the Emergence and Evolution of Basic Color Lexicons

Abstract

Various revisions of the Berlin and Kay (1969) model of the evolution of basic color term systems have been produced in the last thirty years, motivated by both empirical and theoretical considerations. On the empirical side, new facts about color naming systems have continually come to light, which have demanded adjustments in the descriptive model. On the theoretical side, there has been a sustained effort to find motivation in the vision science literature regarding color appearance for the synchronic and diachronic constraints observed to govern color terminology systems. The present paper continues the pursuit of both of these goals. A new empirical question is addressed with data from the World Color Survey (WCS) and a revised model is proposed, which both responds to recently raised empirical questions and provides new motivation from the field of color vision for the observed constraints on color naming.

Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space

“…All of the optimal configurations were obtained by starting from a random assignment of category labels to chips. In contrast, the color-naming system of a given language has a history: It has evolved not from a random state, but rather from an earlier category system, usually one with exactly one fewer categories (1,19). Thus, some languages may not approximate maxima in well-formedness as much as they do points on an evolutionary path leading from one maximum in wellformedness to another.…”

“…We took as our empirical base the color-naming data of the World Color Survey (WCS) (18,19). These data were obtained by using a stimulus palette of 330 colors, as approximated in Fig.…”

Universality of color categorization

“…He reports that his "results largely confirm the generalizations that [Kay & Maffi (1999) and Kay et al (1991)] achieved with non-statistical techniques, even though not all the proposed universals could be confirmed" (p. 525). The biggest difference Jäger found between his PCA analysis and the non-statistical analysis of Kay & Maffi (1999) was that he found yellow more frequently associated with white than they did (p. 533). In a follow-up analysis to their 2006 paper, Lindsey and Brown (2009) found that although there is significant variation across speakers of the same language,…”

Color in achievement contexts in humans

“…Drawing on similarities to word processing Elliot and Maier (2012) (Kinsch & Mangalath, 2011), the meaning of a color is determined by its contextual surround. Some colors, especially those most salient across time, language, and culture (i.e., white, black, and red;see Berlin & Kay, 1969;Kay & Maffi, 1999;Kuehni, 2007) (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001 Meier, D'Agostino, Elliot, Maier, and Wilkowski (2012) introduced an experimental manipulation of the context in which the color red was perceived. Participants were told that they will be interviewed by another person in a separate room about "dating" (i.e., a romantic context) or about "your intelligence" (i.e., an achievement context) and were shown a color-primed picture of one of the several possible interviewers.…”