Concepts Are Restructured During Language Contact: The Birth of Blue and Other Color Concepts in Tsimane'-Spanish Bilinguals

Abstract

Words and the concepts they represent vary across languages. Here we ask if mother-tongue concepts are altered by learning a second language. What happens when speakers of Tsimane', a language with few consensus color terms, learn Bolivian Spanish, a language with more terms? Three possibilities arise: Concepts in Tsimane' may remain unaffected, or they may be remapped, either by Tsimane' terms taking on new meanings or by borrowing Bolivian-Spanish terms. We found that adult bilingual speakers (n = 30) remapped Tsimane' concepts without importing Bolivian-Spanish terms into Tsimane'. All Tsimane' terms become more precise; for example, concepts of monolingual shandyes and yụshñus (~green or blue, used synonymously by Tsimane' monolinguals; n = 71) come to reflect the Bolivian-Spanish distinction of verde (~green) and azul (~blue). These results show that learning a second language can change the concepts in the first language.

Keywords: bilingualism; conceptual representation; language change; open data; open materials.

Fig. 1.

Average surprisal value in each language across all chips (bar graphs) as well as for a sample of 10 chips from the Munsell board, which were selected as follows: The chip with the minimum and maximum average surprisal in each language was selected first, resulting in six color chips presented as diamonds in the plot, along with four random chips presented as squares in the plot. (Some groups had the same chips with minimum/maximum average surprisal, so that is why only 6, not 8, chips are depicted in the figure.) All chips were then plotted across all languages. Note that average surprisal values were calculated for all chips but that only a selection is represented in this figure. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean. Please see Figure S3 in the Supplemental Material for a version of this figure that is accessible to color-blind populations. Asterisks represent statistically significant differences.

Fig. 2.

Chips for which more than half of the population shared a color term. The figure represents the Munsell board (see Fig. S1 in the Supplemental Material for the exact board), in which hue is represented on the x-axis and brightness is represented on the y-axis. The size of diamonds indicates the proportion of the population that used the modal response. The color of each diamond corresponds to the color of the chip deemed to be the best exemplar of that color term by participants during the focal selection task; for example, F1 was deemed to be the best exemplar of jäinäs in Tsimane’ and rojo in Spanish (~red in English) in all four groups (see Table S2 in the Supplemental Material for all focal chips). To see the modal term used for each of the chips, and to view an equivalent figure accessible to color-blind populations, see Figure S4 in the Supplemental Material.

Fig. 3.

Comprehension data for the color words rojo, verde, azul, amarillo, café, morado (in Spanish) and jäinäs, shandyes, yụshñus, chames, cafedyeisi, itsidyeisi (in Tsimane’) for Tsimane’ monolingual, Spanish monolingual, and Tsimane’-Spanish bilingual speakers. Any chip that is colored in the grid is a chip that a participant of that group has chosen for the term in question. The size of the chip is equivalent to the proportion of times that chip was picked for the color term, with all proportions adding up to 1.

Fig. 4.

Normalized histogram of the chips chosen as shandyes-yụshñus, chames-cafedyeisi, and jäinäs-itsidyeisi in Tsimane’ and verde-azul, amarillo-café, and rojo-morado in Bolivian Spanish (~blue-green, yellow-brown, and red-purple in English) across the columns on the Munsell array. The presence of a third color indicates an overlap. Columns in the Munsell array represent different hues. Tsimane’ monolinguals show the largest overlap between chips chosen for each different neighboring color pair, whereas Spanish monolinguals show the least amount of overlap. The Kullback–Leibler divergence (KL div) for each neighboring color pair is also included.

Fig. 5.

Average Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence between the neighboring color-term pairs presented in Figure 4 (green-blue, yellow-brown, red-purple), as well as the reverse of each (i.e., blue-green, brown-yellow, purple-red) across all language groups. See Figure S6 in the Supplemental Material for KL divergences for all neighboring color pairs.