The evolution of GRUE

Grandison, Alexandra; Davies, Ian; Sowden, Paul T.

doi:10.1075/z.191.03gra

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The augmentation that we have shown for the Himba seems unlikely to be simply the result of schooling as suggested by Grandison et al (2014) but very much as if the Himba, especially the younger ones (Griber et al, 2021), have imported a green term, probably from Herero who recently started using the term ngirine (Nguaiko, 2010) instead of the earlier tarazu (Kolbe, 1883); a process we refer to as cultural transfer or simply loanwords. The centroid of the newly acquired Himba word for GREEN was indeed located at much the same place in colour space as it is in English, but it is also in the same place in the neighbouring language of Herero where its words for green and blue come from European languages (Roberson et al, 2005).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 66%

“…In total, the Himba offered 24 colour terms shown in Fig. S2 for naming the 600 approximately uniformly distributed Munsell samples of the computerised experiment, a large increase over the 9 colour terms (5 frequent and 4 infrequent) that were reported in our previous study for naming the 160 fully saturated samples of the physical Munsell Book of Color (Roberson et al, 2005) and the 10 colour terms elicited in a list task (Grandison et al, 2014). In agreement with earlier studies, Himba speakers did not make use of modifiers in their responses.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 74%

“…The high frequency of grine offered by 51 out of 55 observers (mean age = 27.38; SD = 9.84) requires further investigation because in our previous study, grine was an infrequent term (0.5%) that was offered by only 2 observers out of 31 (Roberson et al, 2005) though Grandison et al (2014) in their list task found it was offered by 43 out of 62 observers. For stimuli (n = 98) where grine was now the most frequent term, the ratio of using grine over burou was higher, t(53) = 3.1, p < 0.003, for younger (n = 31; younger mean age = 21.06, SD = 4.09, age range = 16-27; M ratio = 0.83, SD = 0.28) than for older (n = 24; older mean age = 35.54, SD = 9.07, age range = 28-60; M ratio = 0.55, SD = 0.37) Himba.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…In fact, the term was in inconsistent (non-categorical) use then for a variety of saturated brownish and purplish colours. The augmentation of the other term is because Himba is no longer a grue language with the possibility that the change has been gradual (Grandison et al, 2014). It might be thought that 15 years would provide insufficient time to observe the introduction of a GREEN category.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Augmenting a colour lexicon

Mylonas

Caparos

Davidoff

2022

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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Languages differ markedly in the number of colour terms in their lexicons. The Himba, for example, a remote culture in Namibia, were reported in 2005 to have only a 5-colour term language. We re-examined their colour naming using a novel computer-based method drawing colours from across the gamut rather than only from the saturated shell of colour space that is the norm in cross-cultural colour research. Measuring confidence in communication, the Himba now have seven terms, or more properly categories, that are independent of other colour terms. Thus, we report the first augmentation of major terms, namely green and brown, to a colour lexicon in any language. A critical examination of supervised and unsupervised machine-learning approaches across the two datasets collected at different periods shows that perceptual mechanisms can, at most, only to some extent explain colour category formation and that cultural factors, such as linguistic similarity are the critical driving force for augmenting colour terms and effective colour communication.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 66%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 74%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 79%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Augmenting a colour lexicon

Mylonas

Caparos

Davidoff

2022

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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“…Thus, the central motivations for the present work are (a) to address the lack of a comprehensive and systematic understanding of conceptual color associations and (b) through identifying conceptual color associations for English- and monolingual and bilingual Chinese-speaking participants, to enable future work on the effects of color on cognition and behavior to make systematic a priori predictions that are both universal as well as culturally relative (e.g., Davies & Corbett, 1997; Grandison, Davies, & Sowden, 2014; Taylor, Clifford, & Franklin, 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

A systematic investigation of conceptual color associations.

Tham

Sowden

Grandison

et al. 2020

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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A systematic investigation of conceptual colour associations. Associations with colours are a rich source of meaning and there has been considerable interest in understanding the capacity of colour to shape our functioning and behaviour as a result of colour associations. However, abstract conceptual colour associations have not been comprehensively investigated and many of the effects of colour on psychological functioning reported in the literature are therefore reliant on ad hoc rationalisations of conceptual associations with colour (e.g. blue-openness) to explain effects. In the present work we conduct a systematic, cross-cultural, mapping of conceptual colour associations using the full set of hues from the World Colour Survey (WCS). In Experiments 1a and 1b we explored the conceptual associations that English monolingual, Chinese bilingual and Chinese monolingual speaking adults have with each of the 11 Basic English Colour Terms (black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, grey). In Experiment 2 we determined which specific physical WCS colours are associated with which concepts in these three language groups. The findings reveal conceptual colour associations that appear to be 'universal' across all cultures (e.g. white-purity; bluewater/sky related; green-health; purple-regal; pink-'female' traits) as well as culture specific (e.g. red and orange-enthusiastic in Chinese; red-attraction in English). Importantly, the findings provide a crucial constraint on, and resource for, future work that seeks to understand the effect of colour on cognition and behaviour, enabling stronger a priori predictions about universal as well as culturally relative effects of conceptual colour associations on cognition and behaviour to be systematically tested.

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Optimal categorisation

Grandison

Franjieh

Greene

et al. 2021

CadLin

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The debate as to whether language influences cognition has been long standing but has yielded conflicting findings across domains such as colour and kinship categories. Fewer studies have investigated systems such as nominal classification (gender, classifiers) across different languages to examine the effects of linguistic categorisation on cognition. Effective categorisation needs to be informative to maximise communicative efficiency but also simple to minimise cognitive load. It therefore seems plausible to suggest that different systems of nominal classification have implications for the way speakers conceptualise relevant entities. A suite of seven experiments was designed to test this; here we focus on our card sorting experiment, which contains two sub-tasks — a free sort and a structured sort. Participants were 119 adults across six Oceanic languages from Vanuatu and New Caledonia, with classifier inventories ranging from two to 23. The results of the card sorting experiment reveal that classifiers appear to provide structure for cognition in tasks where they are explicit and salient. The free sort task did not incite categorisation through classifiers, arguably as it required subjective judgement, rather than explicit instruction. This was evident from our quantitative and qualitative analyses. Furthermore, the languages employing more extreme categorisation systems displayed smaller variation in comparison to more moderate systems. Thus, systems that are more informative or more rigid appear to be more efficient. The study implies that the influence of language on cognition may vary across languages, and that not all nominal classification systems employ this optimal trade-off between simplicity and informativeness. These novel data provide a new perspective on the origin and nature of nominal classification.

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The evolution of GRUE

Cited by 3 publications

References 25 publications

Augmenting a colour lexicon

Augmenting a colour lexicon

A systematic investigation of conceptual color associations.

Optimal categorisation

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