Color naming across languages reflects color use

Abstract

What determines how languages categorize colors? We analyzed results of the World Color Survey (WCS) of 110 languages to show that despite gross differences across languages, communication of chromatic chips is always better for warm colors (yellows/reds) than cool colors (blues/greens). We present an analysis of color statistics in a large databank of natural images curated by human observers for salient objects and show that objects tend to have warm rather than cool colors. These results suggest that the cross-linguistic similarity in color-naming efficiency reflects colors of universal usefulness and provide an account of a principle (color use) that governs how color categories come about. We show that potential methodological issues with the WCS do not corrupt information-theoretic analyses, by collecting original data using two extreme versions of the colornaming task, in three groups: the Tsimane', a remote Amazonian hunter-gatherer isolate; Bolivian-Spanish speakers; and English speakers. These data also enabled us to test another prediction of the color-usefulness hypothesis: that differences in color categorization between languages are caused by differences in overall usefulness of color to a culture. In support, we found that color naming among Tsimane' had relatively low communicative efficiency, and the Tsimane' were less likely to use color terms when describing familiar objects. Color-naming among Tsimane' was boosted when naming artificially colored objects compared with natural objects, suggesting that industrialization promotes color usefulness.color categorization | information theory | color cognition | Whorfian hypothesis | basic color terms

Seeing Colors: Cultural and Environmental Influences on Episodic Memory

“…This analysis showed the greatest agreement for this five category partition. While the splitting of the blue category is reminiscent of findings from Russian speakers (Winawer et al., 2007), the more interesting finding is the unsplit warm category (i.e., red, orange, and yellow hues), which is consistent with the findings of Gibson et al. (2017) that the top free-choice colors of the Tsimanè do not include orange or pink.…”

Color Naming Reflects Both Perceptual Structure and Communicative Need

“…As stated in their title, Gibson et al. () argued that “color naming across languages reflects color use.” They presented this claim as an alternative to accounts of color naming based on perceptual salience. In support of this claim, they presented evidence of a warm–cool asymmetry in communicative need and a corresponding asymmetry in communicative precision in color naming across languages—suggesting that color naming systems may have adapted to a universal human tendency to communicate preferentially about warm colors.…”

“… Abstract Gibson et al. () argued that color naming is shaped by patterns of communicative need. In support of this claim, they showed that color naming systems across languages support more precise communication about warm colors than cool colors, and that the objects we talk about tend to be warm‐colored rather than cool‐colored.…”

The role of culture in language and cognition

“…Other works such as Wnuk and Majid (2014) and Gibson et al (2017) demonstrate the role of culture in color and olfactory perception. And these hardly exhaust the studies.…”