Color categories are not universal: Replications and new evidence from a stone-age culture.

Roberson, Debi; Davies, Ian; Davidoff, Jules

doi:10.1037/0096-3445.129.3.369

Cited by 497 publications

(466 citation statements)

References 91 publications

(167 reference statements)

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“…Recently, however, an opposed view has also gained prominence, arguing that color naming varies far more across languages than had been suspected (e.g. Lucy, 1997;Roberson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000)-and that even languages with similar color naming systems differ in the placement of boundaries between categories (Roberson, Davidoff, Davies, & Shapiro, 2005). Overall, we have an empirically mixed picture, with both universal tendencies in color naming and some deviation from those tendencies (Regier, Kay, & Khetarpal, 2007)-mirroring the general "cluster and outlier" pattern found when considering other aspects of language in cross-language perspective (Evans & Levinson, 2009: 445).…”

Section: Case Study 1: Color a Continuous Domainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Word Meanings across Languages Support Efficient Communication

Regier

Kemp

Kay

2015

The Handbook of Language Emergence

138

133

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Section: Case Study 1: Color a Continuous Domainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Word Meanings across Languages Support Efficient Communication

Regier

Kemp

Kay

2015

The Handbook of Language Emergence

138

133

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“…English speakers by Roberson, Davies & Davidoff (2000). Note that the higher the score, the poorer the fit.…”

Section: Color Categories 38mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, within these diverse naming systems there are noticeable generalities (Kay, Berlin & Merrifield, 1991;MacLaury, 1987) It is the finding of such generalities that led to the proposal of panhuman universals in cognitive color categorization that transcend terminological differences (e.g., Heider & Olivier, 1972). Roberson, Davies & Davidoff (2000) reported a series of experiments that set out to replicate and extend the work of Rosch Heider in the early 1970s (Rosch Heider, 1972, Heider & Olivier, 1972. Rosch Heider's experiments had been particularly influential in promoting the view that language and cognitive experience are largely independent (in some cases, orthogonal).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

Roberson

Davidoff

Davies

et al. 2005

Cognitive Psychology

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The question of whether language affects our categorization of perceptual continua is of particular interest for the domain of color where constraints on categorization have been proposed both within the visual system and in the visual environment. Recent research Roberson et al., in press) found substantial evidence of cognitive color differences between different language communities, but concerns remained as to how representative might be a tiny, extremely remote community. The present study replicates and extends previous findings using additional paradigms among a larger community in a different visual environment. Adult semi-nomadic tribesmen in Southern Africa carried out similarity judgments, short-term memory and long-term learning tasks. They showed different cognitive organization of color to both English and another language with the five color terms. Moreover, Categorical Perception effects were found to differ even between languages with broadly similar color categories. The results provide further evidence of the tight relationship between language and cognition.

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“…According to prototype models, the color space is divided into (more or less) universal categories anchored around particular focal hues (Berlin & Kay, 1969;Kay & McDaniel, 1978;MacLaury, 1991;Rosch, 1975;Rosch Heider, 1972; but see Roberson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000). For example, there tends to be greater consensus about the best example of blue (i.e., focal blue) than about the boundary between blue and purple.…”

Section: Similarity-based Models Of Categorizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparison and Contrast in Perceptual Categorization.

Hampton

Estes

Simmons

2005

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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People categorized pairs of perceptual stimuli that varied in both category membership and pairwise similarity. Experiments 1 and 2 showed categorization of 1 color of a pair to be reliably contrasted from that of the other. This similarity-based contrast effect occurred only when the context stimulus was relevant for the categorization of the target (Experiment 3). The effect was not simply owing to perceptual color contrast (Experiment 4), and it extended to pictures from common semantic categories (Experiment 5). Results were consistent with a sign-and-magnitude version of N. Stewart and G. D. A. Brown's (2005) similarity-dissimilarity generalized context model, in which categorization is affected by both similarity to and difference from target categories. The data are also modeled with criterion setting theory (M. Treisman & T. C. Williams, 1984), in which the decision criterion is systematically shifted toward the mean of the current stimuli.

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Color categories are not universal: Replications and new evidence from a stone-age culture.

Cited by 497 publications

References 91 publications

Word Meanings across Languages Support Efficient Communication

Word Meanings across Languages Support Efficient Communication

Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

Comparison and Contrast in Perceptual Categorization.

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