Linguistic and Cultural Variation in Early Color Word Learning

Abstract

When and how do infants learn color words? It is generally supposed that color words are learned late and with a great deal of difficulty. By examining infant language surveys in British English and 11 other languages, this study shows that color word learning occurs earlier than has been previously suggested and that the order of acquisition of color words is similar in related languages. This study also demonstrates that frequency and syllabic complexity can be used to predict variability in infant color word learning across languages. In light of recent evidence indicating that color categories have universal biological foundations, these findings suggest that infants' experience and linguistic exposure drive their shift to culturally and linguistically mediated adult-like understandings of color words. The authors express their gratitude to the Oxford BabyLab team for their assistance with collecting data, Caroline Floccia and the Plymouth BabyLab team for making the Plymouth OxCDI data available for use, to Michael Frank and the Wordbank team for the use of their open-source repository, and to Brian MacWhinney for the use of the CHILDES repository. Finally the authors thank all the dozens of individual researchers who have contributed the data to each of these repositories that made this research possible, and to each participant and guardian for taking part. Cross-linguistic Communicative Development Inventories are available from http://wordbank.stanf ord.edu/, and CHILDES data are available from http://childes. talkbank.org/. SHF is funded by the Rhodes Trust.

The role of colour labels in mediating toddler visual attention

“…This claim concurs with previous reports about the timing of colour word learning (Franklin, 2006;Mervis et al, 1995;Pitchford & Mullen, 2002;Sandhofer & Smith, 1999;Soja, 1994). However, recent investigations into colour word learning in different languages suggest that in many languages, the majority of toddlers learn colour words well before their second birthday, at least according to parental reports (Forbes & Plunkett, 2018b;Wag-ner, Jergens, & Barner, 2018) 1 . Forbes and Plunkett examined the reported knowledge of colour words in 8 -30-month-olds across 11 different languages based on parental reports.…”

“…This suggests that there is a possibility of toddlers possessing a very basic colour word knowledge of typical, focal examples of some colours. Additionally, the fact that grey was known to participants suggests other colours may have also been known, as grey is one of the last colours to be learned (Forbes & Plunkett, 2018b).…”

Acquisition of the Meaning of the Word Orange Requires Understanding of the Meanings of Red, Pink, and Purple: Constructing a Lexicon as a Connected System

“…words is not completed when a child produces the words in association with the particular objects that are often associated with the color (e.g., red fire engine), or when the child becomes able to say the correct word in a few particular instances, most often those around the category centroids. The recent study by Forbes and Plunkett (2018) shows that the understanding of the meaning of color words starts earlier than what has previously been assumed. Even so, it does not entail that very young children have a mature representation of the words like adults, as these authors rightly point out.…”

“…These words were shiro ("white"), kuro ("black"), aka ("red"), kiiro ("yellow"), ao ("blue"), midori ("green"), orenji-iro ("orange"), and pinku ("pink"). These perceptual characteristics would likely invite children to ground their first set of words, but even at the earliest stages of color word acquisition, they are not the sole, or even a major, force (Forbes & Plunkett, 2018). The remaining words that adult Japanese speakers consistently use (mizu-iro ["light blue"], kimidori ["yellowish green"], hada-iro ["peach"], odo ["ochre"], and kon ["deep blue"]) but which are not included in the basic color vocabulary in English come into the children's lexicon even later (see Table 1).…”

“…Recent work by Forbes and Plunkett (2018) asked whether the process of color acquisition is predominantly determined by biological factors or input frequency that reflects cultural values. Recent work by Forbes and Plunkett (2018) asked whether the process of color acquisition is predominantly determined by biological factors or input frequency that reflects cultural values.…”