Dr. Debi D. Roberson Profile

Dr. Debi D. Roberson

at Univ of Essex

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Proceedings Article | 18 December 2003 Paper

Color categories are diverse in thought as well as language: evidence from New Guinea and Africa

Debi Roberson

Proceedings Volume 5293, (2003) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.538842

KEYWORDS: Nomenclature, Visualization, Visual system, Cognition, Color vision, Perceptual learning, Psychology, Color imaging, Electronic imaging, Relativity

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Following recent findings of cultural and linguistic relativity in other fields of categorization (e.g. shape, number, space) we report a series of cross-cultural studies of color categorization in adults and young children that address the particular question of whether and to what extent color categories are learned, and free to vary, or innate and universal. Adult speakers of different languages were found to show different patterns of discrimination and memory for the same set of colors and their cognitive representations of color categories appeared to be isomorphic with their linguistic categories. Longitudinal studies of two groups of children in Africa (children from the semi-nomadic Himba tribe in Namibia) and the UK examined the extended process of both lexical and non-lexical color category acquisition. Gradual category acquisition was observed in both groups, rather than all-or-nothing performance and even with intensive adult input (for the English children) color category acquisition appeared to be universally slow and effortful.

Proceedings Article | 6 June 2002 Paper

Color categories are not universal: new evidence from traditional and western cultures

Debi Roberson, Jules Davidoff, Ian Davies

Proceedings Volume 4421, (2002) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.464602

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Evidence presented supports the linguistic relativity of color categories in three different paradigms. Firstly, a series of cross-cultural investigations, which had set out to replicate the seminal work of Rosch Heider with the Dani of New Guinea, failed to find evidence of a set of universal color categories. Instead, we found evidence of linguistic relativity in both populations tested. Neither participants from a Melanesian hunter-gatherer culture, nor those from an African pastoral tribe, whose languages both contain five color terms, showed a cognitive organization of color resembling that of English speakers. Further, Melanesian participants showed evidence of Categorical Perception, but only at their linguistic category boundaries. Secondly, in native English speakers verbal interference was found to selectively remove the defining features of Categorical Perception. Under verbal interference, the greater accuracy normally observed for cross-category judgements compared to within-category judgements disappeared. While both visual and verbal codes may be employed in the recognition memory of colors, participants only make use of verbal coding when demonstrating Categorical Perception. Thirdly, in a brain- damaged patient suffering from a naming disorder, the loss of labels radically impaired his ability to categorize colors. We conclude that language affects both the perception of and memory for colors.

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