Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

Abstract

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.

Word Meanings across Languages Support Efficient Communication

“…Recently, however, an opposed view has also gained prominence, arguing that color naming varies far more across languages than had been suspected (e.g. Lucy, 1997;Roberson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000)-and that even languages with similar color naming systems differ in the placement of boundaries between categories (Roberson, Davidoff, Davies, & Shapiro, 2005). Overall, we have an empirically mixed picture, with both universal tendencies in color naming and some deviation from those tendencies (Regier, Kay, & Khetarpal, 2007)-mirroring the general "cluster and outlier" pattern found when considering other aspects of language in cross-language perspective (Evans & Levinson, 2009: 445).…”

Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space

“…On this view, the boundaries of color categories are projected from these universal foci and therefore tend to lie in similar positions in color space across languages. In contrast, the opposing ''relativist'' view denies that foci are a universal basis for color naming and instead maintains that color categories are defined at their boundaries by local linguistic convention, which is free to vary considerably across languages (2)(3)(4)(5).…”

“…However, despite this clustering near the six foci, the best examples of many color categories do fall elsewhere, a finding less easily accommodated by the focal-color account. Moreover, languages with the same number of categories, apparently organized around the same or similar foci, sometimes differ in their placement of category boundaries (4), which suggests that category boundaries are determined by more than the six proposed universal foci.…”

The spatial foundations of the conceptual system

“…Infants experience all of these but to my knowledge there is no evidence for conceptualization of them before language. For example, any particular color concept may consist of no more than a label that points to a particular type of experience (Roberson et al 2005). It is possible that concepts involving unstructured sensory information require language to be thought about at all.…”