The structure of colour naming space

Abstract

An experiment is described which replicates recent name mapping work, and delves further into the detailed structure of colour naming space. Observers freely named 1044 CRT-displayed colour-background combinations, sampled regularly along the (u',v') axes of the 1976 UCS, and along a luminance axis. Three response measures - response times, confidence ratings and consistencies - were obtained. These measures were collapsed by principal components analysis (PCA) into 'nameability', a single measure of ease of naming of colours. The structure of colour naming space and the use of different colour name types, were investigated. Data confirmed the uniqueness of basic colour terms as compared with the non-basic terms, agreeing with previous constrained naming studies. Colour naming space was found to exhibit regular structure, which appears to be linked to fundamental response categories, and to previous observations that colour naming space may be divided into five major regions.

Confidence Judgments on Color Category Best Exemplars

“…In sum, our confidence results do not support a theory asserting a strong linkage between focal basic colors and confidence (Guest & Van Laar, 2000, nor the focal color salience explanation based on pan-human universal color processing that is integral to the received view (Kay & Maffi, 1999).…”

“…In accord with the received view, they asserted that this quality of nameability produces higher confidence judgments, faster response times, and greater accuracy in tasks employing highly nameable color appearances. They present data in English as an initial validation of their construct of universal nameability and supply an explanation that supports the received view of universal focal color salience (Guest & Van Laar, 2000. In the current article, we use a cross-cultural comparison of naming behaviors in English and Vietnamese to examine the relationship between confidence judgments and nameability and apply our own model of color naming to explain our results.…”

“…Ultimately, Guest and Van Laar (2002) hoped to demonstrate the benefits of nameability in visual search tasks by showing improved accuracy, confidence, and response times for a set of highly nameable colors identified in their own previous research (Guest & Van Laar, 2000). They combined confidence ratings across three stimulus sets: (a) nameable stimuli identified in previous research as evoking consensual naming; (b) stimuli matched for Delta E differences to the most nameable samples based on "metric considerations"; and (c) stimuli selected for maximal discriminability during parallel visual search.…”

“…We have previously shown that relaxing the constraint for monolexemic naming and speeded response results in emergence of different most nameable stimuli in two different language groups (Jameson & Alvarado, 2003). That finding is problematic for Guest and Van Laar's (2000) method of identifying highly nameable exemplars using a codeability index sensitive to measures such as modal frequency and variability of naming. Here, we report that different exemplars can produce high confidence in different language groups, a finding that further supports Jameson's (in press, 2005) proposed model of naming and does not support the view that high confidence arises from a special salience determined by panhuman neural visual processing.…”

Human wavelength identification, numerical analysis and statistical evaluation

“…Although their interest was more in the linguistic or geographic distribution of color terms [3]; [11,14] or in their characterization in color systems [6,7] rather than in the relation of color names to spectral features [5] or color deficiency [16].…”