Communicative need in colour naming

Abstract

Color naming across languages has traditionally been held to reflect the structure of color perception. At the same time, it has often, and increasingly, been suggested that color naming may be shaped by patterns of communicative need. However, much remains unknown about the factors involved in communicative need, how need interacts with perception, and how this interaction may shape color naming. Here, we engage these open questions by building on general information-theoretic principles. We present a systematic evaluation of several factors that may reflect need, and that have been proposed in the literature: capacity constraints, linguistic usage, and the visual environment. Our analysis suggests that communicative need in color naming is reflected more directly by capacity constraints and linguistic usage than it is by the statistics of the visual environment.

Numeral Systems Across Languages Support Efficient Communication: From Approximate Numerosity to Recursion

“…These findings suggest that the pattern of near-optimal efficiency is critically dependent on communicative need (Gibson et al, 2017 ; Kemp & Regier, 2012 ; Zaslavsky, Kemp, Tishby, & Regier, 2019a , 2019b ). We obtain this pattern of near-optimality when assuming a need distribution that is based on corpus counts, and when assuming a steeper curve as might be expected for societies with less need to refer often to high numerosities.…”

Let's talk (efficiently) about us: Person systems achieve near-optimal compression

“…However, it seems unlikely that all the elements of the domain are equally needed, and it has been noted that communicative need may vary across languages . To address these challenges, we infer languagespecific need distributions from corpus frequencies using a recent domain-general method (Zaslavsky, Kemp, Tishby, & Regier, 2019b) based on the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) principle. This method infers a need distribution under minimal assumptions by finding the MaxEnt prior p(t) that is consistent with the system and the normalized corpus frequencies p(w) associated with its forms.…”

Red, yellow, green, and blue are not particularly colorful

“…. It has been suggested that similarities of color categorization across cultures is optimized to communicate efficiently about the irregularly shaped perceptual color space (Abbott, Griffiths, & Regier, 2016;Zaslavsky, Kemp, Regier, & Tishby, 2018;Zaslavsky, Kemp, Tishby, & Regier, 2019). Evidence for this idea is based on the irregular distribution of maximally saturated Munsell chips and naming data from the World Color Survey (WCS).…”

“…Evidence for this idea is based on the irregular distribution of maximally saturated Munsell chips and naming data from the World Color Survey (WCS). Others suggested that cross-cultural tendencies of categories and their prototypes might be related to objects and materials in the natural environment (Gibson et al, 2017;Siuda-Krzywicka et al, 2019;Witzel, 2018a;Witzel & Gegenfurtner, 2018b;Yendrikhovskij, 2001; but see also Zaslavsky et al, 2019).…”