Categories like red, green and yellow are common across different language groups; pink, brown and purple cause disagreement.
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SYDNEY: Seeing red may be a universal experience according to a U.S. study which found that people from different language groups place colours in the same categories.
Delwin Lindsey and Angela Brown of Ohio State University in the U.S. claim that their analysis of a colour-naming database provides "compelling evidence for similarities in the mechanisms that guide the lexical partitioning of colour space" amongst humans from a wide variety of cultures. Their findings are published today in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers have long wondered whether people of different cultures looking at the same blue sky describe it in similar terms. This research suggests that - for many basic colours - the categories used for naming them are often the same.
Lindsey and Brown performed statistical analyses on an enormous collection of colour-naming data called the World Colour Survey. This database is built from the various names people have given to a panel of 320 coloured and 10 achromatic chips.
Living up to its name, the World Colour Survey contains responses from 110 different language groups, with an average of two or three speakers from each group assigning the chips a colour.
In an attempt to control for the influence of modern cultures which have intermingled to a great extent, the participants are mostly drawn from 'preindustrial' societies whose colour naming schema are thought to be uncontaminated by contact with highly industrialised cultures.
Using the technique of cluster analysis, Lindsey and Brown found that for the colours used in the World Colour Survey, the optimum number of chromatic categories across all languages was eight: red, green, yellow-or-orange, blue, purple, brown, pink and grue (green-or-blue).
In theory, the number of categories could have been anywhere between one, if everyone had used the same word to describe each colour, to 320, if each coloured chip had been described differently. Eight was optimum in the sense that a higher value would not have provided increased explanatory power.
The researchers also found regions of colour space which exhibited high levels of commonality across all languages. These are five of the six so-called primary focal colours of English: black, white, red, green and yellow.
Lindsey and Brown speculate that the reason blue - which is also a primary focal colour - did not reach statistical significance may be because of "heavy exposure to UV-B solar radiation in regions where these languages are spoken". According to the researchers, UV-B can have phototoxic effects on parts of the eye, "thereby reducing the blueness of nominally blue chips".
There are also areas of colour space where less agreement is found between respondents within the same language group, such as pink, brown and purple. Interestingly, these regions of disagreement were common to all languages.
This research strikes a blow against the Whorfian hypothesis, named after Benjamin Lee Whorf, which speculates that perception is determined by language. In other words, people can only think about what they can say.
The classic, though somewhat apocryphal example is of the Inuit who - because they have 200 different words for snow (they don't) - can distinguish different types of snow imperceptible to a non-Inuit.
While this new research points to our common heritage, much remains unknown about colour naming. According to Lindsey and Brown, "we still have no physiological theory explaining why some secondary basic colour terms do exist [grey, pink, orange, and purple] whereas others do not." There is no special term for light green, for example.
