Color categories: confirmation of the 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, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000; 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.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2004.10.001
Divisions: College of Health & Life Sciences > School of Psychology
College of Health & Life Sciences > Clinical and Systems Neuroscience
College of Health & Life Sciences
Additional Information: © 2005, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Uncontrolled Keywords: color,perceptual categorization,linguistic relativity
Publication ISSN: 1095-5623
Last Modified: 27 Mar 2024 08:08
Date Deposited: 28 Apr 2010 14:00
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://www.sci ... 0763?via%3Dihub (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2005-06
Authors: Roberson, Debi
Davidoff, Jules
Davies, Ian R.L.
Shapiro, Laura R. (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-3276-457X)

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