World Color Survey color naming reveals universal motifs and their within-language diversity

Lindsey, Delwin T.; Brown, Angela M.

doi:10.1073/pnas.0910981106

Cited by 100 publications

(98 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…We show correspondence between infant and lexical color categories for a selection of three WCS languages, yet inspection of naming data from the other WCS languages reveals correspondences for many other languages as well. We also find that infants' categorical distinctions align with three of the categorical distinctions in the GBPm (12). Fig.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 50%

“…The gaps align qualitatively well with the low points in the bar plot, corresponding to few WCS centroids. Distinctions (42); and the GBPm for row G stimuli (12). Vertical thick black lines indicate category boundaries between stimuli given the same most frequent term within a language.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cognitive scientists from a broad range of disciplines (e.g., linguistics, neuroscience, vision science, anthropology, developmental science) have been working for decades to understand how color terms and their categories form. These efforts have established that although the color lexicons of the world's languages vary in the number of color terms and in how they parse the continuum of color, there is also striking commonality across languages and evidence for "universal" constraints (8)(9)(10)(11)(12). For example, in the World Color Survey (WCS), speakers of 110 nonindustrialized languages named 320 colors (13), and analyses have shown that the centers of the categories denoted by these languages' color terms cluster around particular hues (8).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Biological origins of color categorization

Skelton

Catchpole

Abbott

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

106

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The biological basis of the commonality in color lexicons across languages has been hotly debated for decades. Prior evidence that infants categorize color could provide support for the hypothesis that color categorization systems are not purely constructed by communication and culture. Here, we investigate the relationship between infants' categorization of color and the commonality across color lexicons, and the potential biological origin of infant color categories. We systematically mapped infants' categorical recognition memory for hue onto a stimulus array used previously to document the color lexicons of 110 nonindustrialized languages. Following familiarization to a given hue, infants' response to a novel hue indicated that their recognition memory parses the hue continuum into red, yellow, green, blue, and purple categories. Infants' categorical distinctions aligned with common distinctions in color lexicons and are organized around hues that are commonly central to lexical categories across languages. The boundaries between infants' categorical distinctions also aligned, relative to the adaptation point, with the cardinal axes that describe the early stages of color representation in retinogeniculate pathways, indicating that infant color categorization may be partly organized by biological mechanisms of color vision. The findings suggest that color categorization in language and thought is partially biologically constrained and have implications for broader debate on how biology, culture, and communication interact in human cognition.color lexicons | infant | categorization | color perception | vision

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 50%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Biological origins of color categorization

Skelton

Catchpole

Abbott

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

106

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“…A recent study that applied cluster analysis (39) to the data of the World Color Survey (www1.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU/wcs/), a corpus of color-naming data from 110 unwritten languages, revealed that the particular structure of color terms used by each language is drawn on a set of about three to six universal color-naming systems. Notably, the results of that study suggested that the pattern of categorization for colors between blue and green could be classified into about four types of "motifs" that are common across various mother languages, original habitations, and cultural backgrounds.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cortical response to categorical color perception in infants investigated by near-infrared spectroscopy

Yang

Kanazawa

Yamaguchi

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Perceptual color space is continuous; however, we tend to divide it into only a small number of categories. It is unclear whether categorical color perception is obtained solely through the development of the visual system or whether it is affected by language acquisition. To address this issue, we recruited prelinguistic infants (5-to 7-mo-olds) to measure changes in brain activity in relation to categorical color differences by using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). We presented two sets of geometric figures to infants: One set altered in color between green and blue, and the other set altered between two different shades of green. We found a significant increase in hemodynamic responses during the between-category alternations, but not during the within-category alternations. These differences in hemodynamic response based on categorical relationship were observed only in the bilateral occipitotemporal regions, and not in the occipital region. We confirmed that categorical color differences yield behavioral differences in infants. We also observed comparable hemodynamic responses to categorical color differences in adults. The present study provided the first evidence, to our knowledge, that colors of different categories are represented differently in the visual cortex of prelinguistic infants, which implies that color categories may develop independently before language acquisition.H umans can discriminate thousands of colors among continuous color space. However, we use only a handful of color terms to describe colors in our daily communication. From the analyses of data for the World Color Survey (www1.ICSI.Berkeley. EDU/wcs/), a corpus of color-naming data from 110 universal languages, many studies have revealed that particular structures of color terms used by speakers exist, and that these structures possess some common features (1, 2). Furthermore, these common features had been found even in the color perception of infants before the acquisition of the color terms (3-5). These results imply that categorical color perception may have some biological basis across cultures and languages. On the other hand, one argument for categorical color perception is that the color lexicon changes perceptual differences among colors so that colors from the same linguistic category appear much closer than colors of different categories (6, 7). A possible hypothesis is that categorical color perception has an innate perceptual foundation, and then could be modified along with the acquisition of language (8).A recent set of studies focusing on hemispheric asymmetries in categorical color perception has added another perspective to this hypothesis. Gilbert et al. (9) found that the reaction time for detecting a colored target among differently colored distractors was faster when the target and distractors belonged to different categories than when they belonged to the same category. They named this phenomenon the color-category effect, and reported that this category effect is evident only when the target was in the ...

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“…The biggest difference Jäger found between his PCA analysis and the non-statistical analysis of Kay & Maffi (1999) was that he found yellow more frequently associated with white than they did (p. 533). In a follow-up analysis to their 2006 paper, Lindsey and Brown (2009) found that although there is significant variation across speakers of the same language,…”

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confidence: 99%

Universality of color categorization

Kay¹

2015

Handbook of Color Psychology

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World Color Survey color naming reveals universal motifs and their within-language diversity

Cited by 100 publications

References 20 publications

Biological origins of color categorization

Biological origins of color categorization

Cortical response to categorical color perception in infants investigated by near-infrared spectroscopy

Universality of color categorization

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