Color Entrenchment in Middle-School English Speakers: Cognitive Salience Index Applied to Color Listing

Abstract

This study presents results of two questionnaires posed to English speaking middle-school students to verify the level of color term entrenchment and color prototypes at the age of 12. The methods included color listing and informant introspection on a color prototype linguistic construction. Listing techniques have long been used to identify basic categories and prototypically relevant linguistic items. In this case Sutrop's Cognitive Salience Index (2001) served to reveal the facilitation of retrieval of concepts in long-term memory thus allowing us to evince the degree of entrenchment and salience of the given color term. Participant introspection in conjunction with conceptual salience analysis (Talmy 2000(Talmy , 2005 regarding prototypical items (Rosch 1975(Rosch , 1978(Rosch , 1983 was also employed to identify what items are actually associated prototypically with colors at this age. The results are compared to adult color listings and prototypes (for both English and Italian speakers). Divergence is significant both in regard to the Cognitive Salience Index and within group judgment of the color prototypes. Further details about the subordinate color term choices and the agreement on prototypes reveal the conventionalized linguistic color associations made by this specific group of north-west American middle-school students.