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. 2007 Jan 23;104(4):1436-41.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.0610341104. Epub 2007 Jan 17.

Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space

Terry Regier  1 , Paul Kay, Naveen Khetarpal
Affiliations

Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space

Terry Regier et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

The nature of color categories in the world's languages is contested. One major view holds that color categories are organized around universal focal colors, whereas an opposing view holds instead that categories are defined at their boundaries by linguistic convention. Both of these standardly opposed views are challenged by existing data. Here, we argue for a third view based on a proposal by Jameson and D'Andrade [Jameson KA, D'Andrade RG (1997) in Color Categories in Thought and Language, eds Hardin CL, Maffi L (Cambridge Univ Press, Cambridge, U.K.), pp 295-319]: that color naming across languages reflects optimal or near-optimal divisions of an irregularly shaped perceptual color space. We formalize this idea, test it against color-naming data from a broad range of languages and show that it accounts for universal tendencies in color naming while also accommodating some observed cross-language variation.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Stimuli and example of a mode map. (Upper) WCS stimulus palette. (Lower) Mode map for Lele, a language with four major categories, and several chips for which the modal response was some other category; each category is denoted by a color.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
The chips of the WCS stimulus array as plotted in CIELAB space. The irregularity of the distribution can be seen, particularly in the outward protrusion of the yellow region.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Model results for n = 3, 4, 5, and 6, each compared with color-naming schemes of selected languages from the WCS.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.
WCS color-naming systems that are dissimilar from the predicted optimal configurations.
Fig. 5.
Fig. 5.
Berinmo color categories unrotated (Top) and rotated four (Middle) and eight (Bottom) hue columns. Each colored region corresponds to a named color category.
Fig. 6.
Fig. 6.
Well-formedness for Berinmo when rotated 0, 2, 4, 6, etc., hue columns. The configuration that yields greatest well-formedness is the unrotated (attested) version.
Fig. 7.
Fig. 7.
Rotation analysis of WCS data. (a) Well-formedness averaged across all 110 WCS languages as a function of rotation. For each rotation, the dot shows the average transformed well-formedness value across languages and the bar shows the standard error. (b) Number of WCS languages exhibiting a well-formedness maximum at each rotation.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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