Learning to talk changes how we perceive color
A new British study suggests that our perception of color changes when we acquire language (and the ability to linguistically categorize colors):
"As an adult, color categorization is influenced by linguistic categories. It differs as the language differs," said Kay, who is renowned for his studies on the ways that different cultures classify colors. He cited recent research on the ability of Russian speakers to detect shades of blue [pdf] that English speakers classify as a single color.Link (via Kottke)How does the switch to a language-bound perception of color take place?
"That's the $64,000 question," said Kay. "We have every reason to believe that learning a language has a lot to do with it -- but [as for] how that works, it's early."
the latest
latest episodes
I've always wondered about this, but no one seems to relate. When I was very little I couldn't tell the difference in the picture of our new color TV and the old black and white. I mean I can remember thinking that it all just looked the same. Or maybe I was just a weird kid (a given).
The sky is not actually blue. It only appears to be blue because that is the name we've given that color.
There is a difference in perception between green and blue that not everyone has. My son took a long time to learn the difference, but it wouldn't have mattered if he were trying to speak one of these unified green-blue languages.
this does not surprise me at all - it is thought that syneasthesia (the overlapping of the senses so that one "sees" music, "hears" colour or "tastes" words to name just a few sensory associations)is common in very young children.
it has been suggested that a re-grouping of brain neurons - quite possibly to respond to language learning - makes the experience much more subtle. I had strongish syneasthetic associations when I was a child - they are all but gone now.
naming the colours would differentiate them in specific ways that could over-ride the earlier, murkier impressions.
Color variations are continuous. The rainbow doesn't have seven colors (or any other small integer number of colors), it has an essentially infinite number of distinct colors. But we don't see it that way; we divide it into distinct color bands. We give those color bands names, and different cultures do it differently.
Actually, the Franklin et al. PNAS study shows no such thing. All their work shows is that adults have a left-hemisphere bias for color categorization while infants 4-6 months have a right hemisphere bias. They go on to speculate that because language processing occurs in the left hemisphere, language acquisition forces a categorization scheme upon us that didn't exist prior to language. And from that, they further speculate that language-using adults may have different color experience than pre-linguistic infants.
This is all mess, though. Basically the authors are claiming that learning color words creates color categories that aren't innate. Okay, but why think that linguistic categorizations are radically different? Do the infants sort colors themselves differently (some red as blue, say) and not simply use a different part of the brain to track the same color properties out in the world? Infants and non-linguistic animals successfully track color properties, which probably means that they arguably possess some non-linguistic (non-conceptual?) category scheme. Language mainly lets us talk about things when they're not around and in more detail; why conclude that language always changes what is already there?
More importantly, why think that differences in where information gets processed in the brain translate into different conscious experiences — that is, that babies (consciously) see pure colors while adults' (conscious) color experiences are "refracted" through language simply because language happens on the left side of our heads? And what would it mean to (consciously) see colors purely or As They Really Are? After all, humans are trichromats and have eyes sensitive to only certain wavelengths of light unlike, say, some birds that are tetrachromats. Which means it's pretty tough, if not in principle impossible, to know what a pure color — meaning, presumably, color apart from any perceiver — would be. Add to that all sorts of research showing that humans can track all sorts of things nonconsciously, which means that evidence about tracking bias reveals little about the nature of conscious tracking experience — or the difference between being sensitive to differences in color as opposed to what it's like for one to see colors. (The phenomenon called "blindsight" is an incontrovertibly cool example of nonconscious tracking.) Last, how could they determine whether infants experienced colors differently than adults (or whether two adults experienced colors differently, for that matter)?
Sorry for the long comment, but it strikes me that both the Wired guy and the PNAS folks don't really have a clear idea what they're talking about mainly because they haven't clearly and cleanly drawn their own categories — conscious v. nonconscious seeing, color properties v. color experience, linguistic v. non-linguistic tracking/sorting, and so on. To be fair, the article itself is far less sexy and provocative than the Wired write up of it (as is usually the case), but it's still muddled in many important respects.
I learned from Oliver Sacks's last book (Musicophilia) that research shows that all kids are born with absolute pitch, but kids who don't grow up speaking tonal languages almost always lose it. Whereas kids who grow up speaking, say, Mandarin, retain perfect pitch.
In the same essay is a statement by someone who has absolute pitch, saying that to him, notes are like colors. It would be crazy if you saw a blue paper and said "I can't tell what color that is," and then were shown a red paper (and told it was red) and said "Okay, if that paper is red, this paper must be blue." Everyone has a sense of "absolute color." (This is all paraphrased from the book.)
But, of course, things like this show that we actually don't have a sense of absolute color. Our sense of color is as strongly influenced by language as our sense of pitch. We see a bunch of different wavelengths as "green" -- even if we know they're different shades of green, we see them as fundamentally the same color. We see cyan and navy blue as fundamentally the same color -- "blue" -- while Russians see them as separate colors, like we see orange and yellow.
Fascinating stuff. All our senses are so influenced by our language, the way we communicate those senses to others.
Really, that explains a lot. Always hope for the grand children then
This isn't strictly news- it's been known for a long time that in, for example, Ancient Greece, blue and shiny bronze were regarded (and maybe therefore perceived) as exactly the same colour.
Reminds me of an old National Lampoon piece (late '70s, about the time we were supposed to be nearly converted to the metric system (lol), about how the US was converting to "metric colors".
I'm hesitant to agree, at least in the extreme situations I can think of where a language has fewer color words than English. We all still see the full range of colors, but we are limited in our ability to describe this range of colors by the terms we can use. Think of all the web developers and color nerds out there who can see the difference between the minutia contained in a #RGB hex code. Do people suddenly see more colors when they are given the ability to describe them?
On the flip side, some languages only have three color words, which typically end up being black, white and red; on the other hand, I'm sure people can tell the difference between the color of the sky and the color of grass (assuming that the local grass is green, and not sky blue). Maybe I misunderstand how color words work in languages, but that's one situation that this theory would have to take into account, right?
Further to what RM has said, it strikes me that learning a language influences the way one communicates a colour (of course), but not necessarily the way one perceives it.
"He cited recent research on the ability of Russian speakers to detect shades of blue [pdf] that English speakers classify as a single color."
Hmm - RECENT research? I did Russian at school for a few years in the early '80s, and I distinctly remember my teacher telling me that Russians don't have a "blue" as such, but rather two colours which we English-speakers would call light blue and dark blue.
Recent research indeed!
I'm going to add my voice to the dissent.
When you look at the colour spectrum, there are pretty clear bands of colour, it isn't really a perfectly smooth transition along its length (yes, in frequency it is, but our eyes see bands and subtle plateaus). You can essentially see colour/blend/colour/blend/colour..
Although, of course, nobody had colour spectrums when we came up with the basic colour names.
I suspect the colour definitions in various languages are more related to how useful it is, on a day-to-day basis, to have vastly separable colours, and that they don't really affect how we actually perceive them.
Eg: a sky-blue shell and a pastel-blue shell, are both blue shells.. but get the wrong bucket of "faux burnished quail's-supper pink" and your spouse may not speak to you til after the divorce.
Lisa: Okay, I'd like 25 copies in canary, 25 in goldenrod, 25 in saffron, and 25 in paella.
Clerk: OK, 100 yellow.
Also, forgot to mention, that even though there are infinite colours in the spectrum, our eyes have cones sensitive only to red, green and blue (not evenly distributed, and differently sensitive).
So we are bound by our senses, and do not necessarily 'see' what our finely tuned scientific instruments tell us is true.
Umbert Eco discussed this in his paper "how culture conditions the colors we see" Haven't found a link to the paper itself but is anthologised in his book signs
On a personal note - i was very suspicious that the color I thought was green was not the same color that everyone else thought was green - existential crises - they're everywhere
WTF? I learned about this theory over 20 years ago as an undergraduate in anthrolinguistics. Cultures that have only three names for colors (black, white and "red", very consistently) don't regard blue and red as being different, just variations. How did the researchers know that it's always "red"? Because the speakers would always pick a shade of what we call red as the representative color. Obviously, we only perceive blue as being different from red when there's a name for it, likewise yellow, green, etc. Wish I could cite the study about all this.
there are emotions tied to the sounds of words. Perhaps if you look at the emotion around the sounds in the language, it could give insight on how people perceive the colors.
Hmm. I don't think the study says more than, "People with lots of words for colours can sort colours into finer categories than those who have few words."
If I show a Japanese person a green ball and a blue ball, and ask her to pick the aoi one, of course she's going to be confused for a second (since aoi traditionally means both blue and green). If I ask for the midori one she'll know immediately which one I'm talking about (green).
Conversely, if she showed me a ball coloured Pantone 199 and one coloured Pantone 206 and asked for the akai ball, I'd be confused until she gave me the Pantone number of the one she wanted, or said she wanted the warm red or the cool red. (Actually, I wouldn't get it until she gave me both numbers, 199 is warmer than 206.)
So are we perceiving the colours differently or categorising them differently?
At Boskone before last, I suggested that having names for colors made me more sensitive to the differences, and my notion was overruled by those present. I feel at least conditionally validated.
I don't think it's just language.
Technical knowledge and memories color my perception of color.
I would say that I perceive colors in more than one way at the same time.
But the perception is tied in with knowledge somehow, to me.
The perception of color also depends on it's application, on the thing that has the color.
I can see the seven colors of the rainbow.
Or just three colors: red, green, blue.
Some colors always feel like mixes: orange, blue-green and purple, because that's the way my color-pencils worked as a child. I remember noticing "skin tone" (the white variant) as a seperate color, because there was a special pencil for that in my coloring set. It then became distinct from orange.
And I remember being very surprised when I learned that you can make any color by mixing paint: cyan, yellow and magenta.
(And I didn't quite agree, because it seemed nearly impossible to mix a fresh green like that).
I can look at my surroundings and see 7 colors, or look at it as variants of 3 colors.
I.e. yellow feels like it's own color and like a variant of green + red at the same time.
It always has it's own status though, because it's right in the middle of red and green, so can't use those words and still be precise.
Same with middle-gray.
Neon colors don't fall in the rainbow spectrum, in my mind. Probably because I was introduced to them later in life.
I was shocked when I found out about them, and categorized the neon aspect as a seperate characteristic that color can have.
They make up a seperate system: regular colors + neon.
But neon-brown is unimaginable to me.
All these perceptions are not just theoretical, it feels like I can switch modes or combine modes, depending on the situation.
The default mode is 7 colors, I think.
I think that's what I was taught first.
Neon is a limited subset of that, with the neon extension.
I can imagine other people not seeing it this way, or having different emotional systems of classifications, and I remember not seeing it like that before I learned about coloring pencils, later paint, and television after that.
I tried looking at a picture of a rainbow just now, to see if I can distinguish bands, and I don't.
I can see seven distinct colors, or I can see three, with mixtures in between.
But no neons.
Another color observaton that is important in my classifications, is that I see certain colors on specific objects as a neutral color. Or not as a color at all.
My own skin tone, blue sky, green grass.
These don't feel like colors, but variants of neutral, and I don't register them in normal situations, I think.
As I grew older, same happened to blue jeans. I feel that you can wear any color with blue jeans, and not notice the blue as a color that is important to the outfit. This blue, for jeans, became a variant of white almost.
Regular blue pants seem blue though.
When jeans have different colors than blue they feel like the color is very strong.
This comment is probably too long for anyone to read, but it's nice to organize my thoughts, so thanks for the article. :-)
I've always suspected this.
Furthermore, is there any proof that the colour that I see as "blue" looks anything like the colour anyone else sees? It's impossible to say because any words that we use to describe colour are based on the colours they describe.
The average human can see 1,000,000 colors/shades - the red/green color blind can see 10,000 colors/shades and some women can see 100,000,000 colors/shades - but we'll just stick with a million for the average human.
This is because the cones in the eye - that come in three types, or I should say react to three general wavelengths - can only see about 100 colors/shades each. Each color we see in a combination of the stimulations (valued at 1 to 100) an object causes in each of the three cones. 100^3 = 1000000
Your genetics determine what general wavelength each cone responds to.
One person will have receptors (the *'s) at
----*-----*-----*----
wavelengths
(normal male)
or
---**-----*-----*----
wavelengths
(normal female - women have a 4th receptor that is usually close enough to their other red receptor as to not make a difference in perception)
or
*---*-----*-----*----
wavelengths
(a one-in-a-million woman who's 4th receptor is far enough away to let them see 100,000,000 colors/shades. These women are more likely to have baby boys who suffer from red-green colorblindness)
or
---**-----------*----
(red-green colorblind men, with their middle cone too close to the red spectrum instead of the green)
Now, all this was just a lead up to ask:
What if the different cultures have different definitions for colors because their average genes cause them to have
----*-------*--*-----
as their receptors while our English language was developed by people with genes of
----*-----*------*---,
which would make it so what they perceive as green or blue are in FACT closer wavelengths than what the English perceive as green or blue?
The idea that the words you use shape they way you think is sometimes called the Sapir-Worf hypothesis. It is also flamebait in some discussion groups, but it may find some application here.
When I was young and painted with poster paints, the traditional mixing primaries were red, yellow and blue. You could not get a good green that way, but you could get something that was green-ish, so given the general principle that mixing colours generally made everything muddier and less saturated, it seemed to work.
Pink was normally made from red and white, but there were other pinks that were somehow pinker and got gettable in this way. There was also a light blue that wasn't achieveable by mixing blue and white. When the first 12-colour ballpoint pens came out, then I was able to see the colour, and know that that was the one that I couldn't get with the paints. However, when I learned the names 'magenta' and 'cyan', and had a handle on the idea of the colour, this not only helped me express the idea in a way that was understandable to others, it laso helped me understand it myself (I must have been about ten at the time, I guess).
Other writers have noticed that Russian and Japanese have different words for light blue and dark blue. In the UK we have Cambridge and Oxford. We have separate colours for yellow and brown (which is a dark yellow). Flesh pink may be red plus white, but there are other, brighter pinks that aren't. However light green and dark green are still green.
Berinmo, a forest-dwelling tribe in New Guinea, does not have separate words for blue and green but does have a boundary between "nol" (yellow-green) and "wor" (blue-green). In tests where they were asked to pick a matching patch to a given sample using their colour memory, they were poor at distinguishing many colours that are celarly different to us, but were good at matching subdividsions within 'green'. We don't know that the words have helped them distinguish the colours. Their eyes are probably the same as ours. But it does seem to help when memorising colours, and perhaps associating them with other familiar objects (such as 'tomato red' might work for us).
The experiments described in the article come at the subject from a different angle - they postulate a link between colour vision and the language centres from brain scans. This is not an unreasonable thing to look for given the work that has gone before, and it is not surprising to see it in the brain scans. But it is nice to check.
This is not new. I learned this in undergrad in the 90's and it was pretty old hat then.
Arkizzle (14): Your copy-shop clerk is wrong. Back when I was buying paper by the ream and case, Canary was one of the colors of 16-20 lb. copier bond. Goldenrod was the yellow version of twiltone or mimeotone -- fuzzier, more absorbent papers used for mimeography. Saffron was the golden-yellow option in the expensive color-saturated cover stocks. And Paella, I never ran into.
Kip (20), was I around for that conversation? I would have agreed with you. Color names make people look harder at colors, and in some cases provide cues that help them notice the presence of secondary tints, like the orange component in saffron yellow.
Agent 86 (23), is there a test for that variant color vision? Ever since I was a little kid, I've known that I could see more colors, or finer distinctions in colors, than the people around me. I've never been able to figure out whether it's my vision, or whether I just pay more attention to colors and am better at remembering them. I can also see better in the dark than anyone else I know except Neil Gaiman, but I have no idea whether that's related.
Richard Kirk (24), the difference between the colors of light and the colors of pigments is a great source of confusion. For some reason, basic explanations of color theory never mention it.
@#19: complete tangent: is that where "midouri" (tasty green melon liquor) comes from? If so, Japan is even more awesome than previously suspected.
As far as I know, Midori is the melon, the color of the melon, the flavor of the melon, and the drink made out of melon.
and since it can also be a girl's name, there is a whole other nuance
Teresa, I would think the seeing in the dark bit is separate, having to do with how large your aperture is. I used to be able to pick out a penny in a field at night, before the LASIK, and was unsurprised when the Ophthalmologist told me my opening was much larger than average. I miss my night vision.