Color naming across languages reflects color use
Name
10785.full.pdf
Size
1.52 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f793771e655c20f54c45686c0fb56059
Author(s)
Ratnasingam, Sivalogeswaran
Piantadosi, Steven T.
Conway, Bevil R.
Gibson, Edward A
Futrell, Richard Landy Jones
Jara-Ettinger, Julian
Mahowald, Kyle Adam
Bergen, Leon
Gibson, Mitchell
Date Issued
October 2017
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
Citation
Gibson, Edward et al. “Color Naming Across Languages Reflects Color Use.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, 40 (September 2017): 10785–10790 © 2017 National Academy of Sciences
Version
Final published version
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 color-naming 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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/PNAS.1619666114
