Color naming across languages

Kay, Paul; Maffi, Luisa; Merrifield, William R.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511519819.002

Cited by 159 publications

(178 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…for their number of color terms). Regier, Kay, & Khetarpal (2007) formalized this proposal and tested it against the color naming data of the World Color Survey, or WCS; this dataset is described in detail by Kay, Berlin, Maffi, Merrifield, & Cook (2009). The WCS contains color naming data from 110 languages of non-industrialized societies, collected relative to a standard color naming stimulus grid, approximated in the upper panel of Figure 3.…”

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

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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

Self Cite

138

133

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“…These efforts have established that although the color lexicons of the world's languages vary in the number of color terms and in how they parse the continuum of color, there is also striking commonality across languages and evidence for "universal" constraints (8)(9)(10)(11)(12). For example, in the World Color Survey (WCS), speakers of 110 nonindustrialized languages named 320 colors (13), and analyses have shown that the centers of the categories denoted by these languages' color terms cluster around particular hues (8). These particular hue regions also appear to be central to the color categories of industrialized languages (e.g., English), and are commonly the location of the "focal" best examples of color terms (10).…”

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confidence: 99%

Biological origins of color categorization

Skelton

Catchpole

Abbott

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

106

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The biological basis of the commonality in color lexicons across languages has been hotly debated for decades. Prior evidence that infants categorize color could provide support for the hypothesis that color categorization systems are not purely constructed by communication and culture. Here, we investigate the relationship between infants' categorization of color and the commonality across color lexicons, and the potential biological origin of infant color categories. We systematically mapped infants' categorical recognition memory for hue onto a stimulus array used previously to document the color lexicons of 110 nonindustrialized languages. Following familiarization to a given hue, infants' response to a novel hue indicated that their recognition memory parses the hue continuum into red, yellow, green, blue, and purple categories. Infants' categorical distinctions aligned with common distinctions in color lexicons and are organized around hues that are commonly central to lexical categories across languages. The boundaries between infants' categorical distinctions also aligned, relative to the adaptation point, with the cardinal axes that describe the early stages of color representation in retinogeniculate pathways, indicating that infant color categorization may be partly organized by biological mechanisms of color vision. The findings suggest that color categorization in language and thought is partially biologically constrained and have implications for broader debate on how biology, culture, and communication interact in human cognition.color lexicons | infant | categorization | color perception | vision

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“…However, this could not be the case for color categories that lack this kind of separable statistical regularity. Color forms a continuous perceptual domain that can be divided in a remarkably variable number of ways (Kay, Berlin, Maffi, & Merrifield, 1997;MacLaury, 1987). Moreover, perceived color varies with changes in illumination to such an extent that the only available ''statistical regularity" is generally the verbal label that is applied to a particular range of colors.…”

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confidence: 99%