Colour categories in a stone-age tribe

Davidoff, Jules; Davies, Ian; Roberson, Debi

doi:10.1038/18335

Cited by 343 publications

(237 citation statements)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

224

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The paradigm has previously shown that English speakers demonstrate CP by more accurate cross-category than withincategory discrimination (Pilling et al, 2003) and that Berinmo speakers show CP for the boundary between nol and wor (Davidoff, Davies & Roberson, 1999). As with the similarity judgments, comparisons are made between Himba and Berinmo judgments for the Himba and the Berinmo boundaries.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

Roberson

Davidoff

Davies

et al. 2005

Cognitive Psychology

Self Cite

302

255

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

Roberson

Davidoff

Davies

et al. 2005

Cognitive Psychology

Self Cite

302

255

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This ability to streamline processing applies to various types of input, both linguistic and nonlinguistic in nature (Harnad, 1987). Evidence that these categories affect listeners' treatment of perceptual stimuli has been found in diverse areas such as color perception (Davidoff et al, 1999), facial expressions (Angeli et al, 2008;Calder et al, 1996), familiar faces (Beale & Keil, 1995), artificial categories of objects (Goldstone et al, 2001), speech perception (Liberman et al, 1957;Kuhl, 1991), and even emotions (Hess et al, 2009;Sauter et al, 2011). Two core tendencies are found across these domains: a sharp shift in the identification function between category centers, and higher rates of discrimination for stimuli from different categories than for stimuli from a single category.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A unified account of categorical effects in phonetic perception

2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Categorical effects are found across speech sound categories, with the degree of these effects ranging from extremely strong categorical perception in consonants to nearly continuous perception in vowels. We show that both strong and weak categorical effects can be captured by a unified model. We treat speech perception as a statistical inference problem, assuming that listeners use their knowledge of categories as well as the acoustics of the signal to infer the intended productions of the speaker. Simulations show that the model provides close fits to empirical data, unifying past findings of categorical effects in consonants and vowels and capturing differences in the degree of categorical effects through a single parameter.

show abstract

“…Do differences between languages cause systematic differences in the cognition of their speakers? Questions about the relationship between language and thought are among the most controversial in cognitive science (Boroditsky, 2001;Davidoff et al, 1999;Gentner & Goldin-Meadow, 2003;Gumperz & Levinson, 1996;Levinson et al, 2002;Li & Gleitman, 2002;Pinker, 1994;Rosch Heider, 1972). Theoretical proposals concerning the nature of this relationship run the gamut from suggestions that individual languages strongly influence their speakers cognition (Davidoff et al, 1999;Levinson, 2003;Whorf, 1956) to suggestions that there is no causal relationship between speakers' language and their cognition (Fodor, 1975;Li & Gleitman, 2002;Pinker, 1994), with a number of more moderate proposals falling between these extremes (Gentner, 2003;Kay & Kempton, 1984;Slobin, 1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbal interference suppresses exact numerical representation

Frank

Fedorenko

Lai

et al. 2012

Cognitive Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Language for number is an important case study of the relationship between language and cognition because the mechanisms of non-verbal numerical cognition are well-understood. When the Pirahã (an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe who have no exact number words) are tested in non-verbal numerical tasks, they are able to perform one-to-one matching tasks but make errors in more difficult tasks. Their pattern of errors suggests that they are using analog magnitude estimation, an evolutionarily-and developmentally-conserved mechanism for estimating quantities. Here we show that English-speaking participants rely on the same mechanisms when verbal number representations are unavailable due to verbal interference. Followup experiments demonstrate that the effects of verbal interference are primarily manifest during encoding of quantity information, and-using a new procedure for matching difficulty of interference tasks for individual participants-that the effects are restricted to verbal interference. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that number words are used online to encode, store, and manipulate numerical information. This linguistic strategy complements, rather than altering or replacing, non-verbal representations.

show abstract

Colour categories in a stone-age tribe

Cited by 343 publications

References 4 publications

Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

A unified account of categorical effects in phonetic perception

Verbal interference suppresses exact numerical representation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About