Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space

Abstract

The nature of color categories in the world's languages is contested. One major view holds that color categories are organized around universal focal colors, whereas an opposing view holds instead that categories are defined at their boundaries by linguistic convention. Both of these standardly opposed views are challenged by existing data. Here, we argue for a third view based on a proposal by Jameson and D'Andrade [Jameson KA, D'Andrade RG (1997) in Color Categories in Thought and Language, eds Hardin CL, Maffi L (Cambridge Univ Press, Cambridge, U.K.), pp 295-319]: that color naming across languages reflects optimal or near-optimal divisions of an irregularly shaped perceptual color space. We formalize this idea, test it against color-naming data from a broad range of languages and show that it accounts for universal tendencies in color naming while also accommodating some observed cross-language variation.cognitive modeling ͉ color categories ͉ color terms ͉ semantic universals

Word Meanings across Languages Support Efficient Communication

“…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).…”

“…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.…”

“…Following Regier et al (2007), we treat the continuous color domain as discretized into the 330 color chips 2 The Munsell color chips of maximum chroma (saturation) represented in this research are approximately as saturated as can be achieved using durable, non-fluorescent pigments. Some higher chroma values can be produced with other pigments, especially in the blue-green and green regions; in the focal green region perhaps an additional 2-4 Munsell chroma steps can be achieved.…”

“…2 Each speaker of each language in the WCS was shown each color chip in this grid one at a time, in a fixed random order, and asked to provide their language's name for that color. In the analyses reported here and by Regier et al (2007), these data were treated as follows. For each language, each chip in the stimulus grid was labeled by the modal color term for that chip-that is, the color term that was used to label that chip by the greatest number of speakers of that language.…”

“…We take the perceptual similarity of two colors x and y to be a Gaussian function of the perceptual distance between them (Nosofsky, 1986;Regier et al, 2007):…”