DOCSLIB.ORG

Generating and Resolving Vague Color References

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Generating and Resolving Vague Color References Generating and Resolving Vague Color References Timothy Meo1 and Brian McMahan2 and Matthew Stone2;3 1Linguistics, 2Computer Science, 3Center for Cognitive Science Rutgers University 1New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1184, 2Piscataway, NJ 08854-8019 [email protected] Abstract us to use empirical methods to induce semantic We describe a method for distinguish- representations on a wide scale from multimodal ing colors in context using English color corpus data (Roy and Reiter, 2005; Steels and Bel- terms. Our approach uses linguistic the- paeme, 2005; McMahan and Stone, 2014). ories of vagueness to build a cognitive We present our ideas through a case study of model via Bayesian rational analysis. In the color vocabulary of English. In particular, particular, we formalize the likelihood that we study the problem solving involved in us- a speaker would use a color term to de- ing color descriptors creatively to distinguish one scribe one color but not another as a func- color swatch from another, similar color. In our tion of the background frequency of the model, these descriptions inevitably refine the in- color term, along with the likelihood of terpretation of language in context. We assume selecting standards in context that fit one that speakers make choices to fulfill their commu- color and not the other. Our approach ex- nicative goals while reproducing common patterns hibits the qualitative flexibility of human of description. Using corpus data, we are able color judgments and reaches ceiling per- to quantify how representative of typical English formance on a small evaluation corpus. speakers’ behavior a particular context-dependent semantic interpretation is. 1 Introduction Our model naturally exhibits many of the pref- A range of research across cognitive science, sum- erences of previous work on vague descriptions. marized in Section 2, suggests that people negoti- For example, the system avoids placing thresh- ate meanings interactively to draw useful distinc- olds in small gaps (van Deemter, 2006), that is, tions in context. This ability depends on using in regions of conceptual space that account for lit- words creatively, interpreting them flexibly, and tle of the probability mass of possible interpreta- tracking the effects of utterances on the evolving tions. In such circumstances, the system prefers context of the conversation. We adopt a computa- more specific vocabulary, where interlocutors are tional approach to these fundamental skills. Our more likely to draw fine distinctions (Baumgaert- goal is to quantify them, scale them up, and eval- ner et al., 2012). Our approach realizes these ef- uate their possible contribution to coordination of fects by simple and uniform decision making that meaning in practical dialogue systems. extends to multidimensional spaces and arbitrary Our work extends three traditions in computa- collections of vocabulary. tional linguistics. Our approach to semantic repre- We begin the paper by describing the semantic sentation builds on previous research that empha- representation of vagueness in dialogue. Vague- sizes the context dependence and interactive dy- ness, we assume, is uncertainty about where to namics of meaning (Barker, 2002; Larsson, 2013; set the threshold in context for the concept evoked Ludlow, 2014). Our approach to pragmatic rea- by a term. Speakers have the option to triangu- soning builds on work on referring expressions late more precise thresholds by interactive strate- and its characterization of the problem solving in- gies such as accommodation, and this helps ex- volved in using vague language to identify entities plain how vague descriptions can be used to refer uniquely in context (Kyburg and Morreau, 2000; to objects precisely (van Deemter, 2006). van Deemter, 2006). Finally, we take a perceptu- In Section 3, we describe our model of speak- ally grounded approach to meaning, which allows ers’ decisions in conversation. We focus on speak- ers that aim to distinguish one thing from another; in these cases, we assume speakers aim to choose a term that’s interpreted so that it fits the target and excludes the distractor, while matching broader patterns of language use. We show how to combine the ideas in Section 4. We formalize the likelihood that a speaker would use a color term to describe one color but not an- other as a function of the likelihood of selecting standards to justify its application in this context, along with the background frequency of the color term. We describe an implementation of the for- malism and report its the qualitative and quan- Figure 1: A brown dog and a tan one—or a tan titative behavior in Section 5. It works with a dog and a white one (Young et al., 2014). generic lexicon of more than 800 color terms and reaches ceiling performance in interpreting user self (Ludlow, 2014). And we won’t consider the color descriptions in the data set of Baumgaertner way multiple descriptions constrain one another, et al. (2012). While substantial additional research as in Figure 1, although we expect to explain it is required to explore the dynamics of vagueness as a side-effect of holistic interpretive processing in conversation, our results already suggest new (Stone and Webber, 1998). We see our work as a ways to apply generic models of the use of vague prerequisite for the model building and data col- language in support of sophisticated, open-ended lection required to address such issues. construction of meaning in situated dialogue. In our view, the users of Young et al. (2014) 2 The Linguistics of Vagueness are using tan to name color categories. Colors are visual sensations that vary continuously across a Figure 1 shows an image from a public data set space of possibilities. Color categories are clas- developed to study how people label images with sifiers that group regions in color space together captions (Young et al., 2014). One user chose to (Gardenfors,¨ 2000; Larsson, 2013). Color terms distinguish the dogs by calling one brown and the in English also have another sense, not at issue in other tan. Another distinguished the dogs by call- this paper, where they refer to an underlying prop- ing one tan and the other white. Each used the tan erty that correlates with color, as in red pen (writes dog to refer to a different dog—yet the way each in red ink) (Kennedy and McNally, 2010). described the other dog left no doubt about the Empirically, color categories seem to be con- correct interpretation. This variability and context vex regions (Gardenfors,¨ 2000; Jager,¨ 2010)—in dependence is characteristic of vagueness in lan- fact, we model them as rectangular box-shaped re- guage. The dogs in Figure 1 are borderline cases; gions in hue–saturation–value (HSV) space. Thus, there’s no clear answer about whether they are tan color categories involve boundaries, thresholds or or not, and speakers are free to talk of either, both, standards that delimit the regions in color space or neither of them as tan, depending on their pur- where they apply; context sensitivity can be mod- poses in the conversation. eled as variability in the location of these bound- In this paper, we explore the descriptive vari- aries (Kennedy, 2007). For example, when we cat- ability seen in Figure 1. How is it that speak- egorize the lighter dog of Figure 1 as being distinc- ers can settle borderline cases in useful ways to tive in its color, we must have a color category that move a dialogue forward, and how can hearers rec- fits this dog but not the darker one. This category ognize those decisions? We won’t consider the will group together colors with a suitable interval interactive strategies that interlocutors can use to of yellow hues, suitable low levels of saturation, confirm, negotiate or contest potentially problem- and suitably high values on the white–black con- atic descriptions, although that’s obviously crucial tinuum. We can think of this category as one pos- for successful reference (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs, sible interpretation for the word tan. By contrast, 1986), for coordinated meaning (Steels and Bel- categorizing the darker dog of Figure 1 as distinc- paeme, 2005), and perhaps even for meaning it- tively tan involves choosing a category with dif- ferent thresholds for hue, saturation and value— dog. The next section explains how to formalize thresholds that fit the color of the darker dog but the reasoning involved in assessing these proba- exclude that of the lighter one. bilities, reviews one instantiation of this reasoning When interlocutors use vague terms in conver- for learning semantics, and develops another in- sation, they constrain the way others can use those stantiation for distinguishing colors in context. terms in the future (Lewis, 1979; Kyburg and Mor- reau, 2000; Barker, 2002). For example, if we hear 3 Rational Analysis of Descriptions one or the other dog of Figure 1 described as tan, Speakers can use language for a variety of pur- it constrains how we will interpret subsequent uses poses. Their decisions of what to say thus depend of the word tan. Concretely, we might update the on knowledge of language, their communicative perceptual classifier we associate with tan in this situation, and their communicative goals. Follow- context so that it fits the target dog and excludes its ing Anderson (1991), rational analysis invites us alternative (Larsson, 2013). We see this as a case to explain an agent’s action as a good way to ad- of accommodation, in the sense of (Lewis, 1979). vance the agent’s goals given the agent’s informa- As speakers, we often count on our interlocu- tion. When applied to communication, this ap- tors to accommodate us (Thomason, 1990). We proach allows us not only to derive utterances for can use vague terms confidently as long as the dis- systems but also to infer linguistic representations tinction we aim to draw with them is clear in con- from utterances when we know the agent’s com- text and as long as our choice is sufficiently in line municative situation and communicative goals.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Color Names Across Languages: Salient Colors and Term Translation in Multilingual Color Naming Models
    EUROVIS 2019/ J. Johansson, F. Sadlo, and G. E. Marai Short Paper Color Names Across Languages: Salient Colors and Term Translation in Multilingual Color Naming Models Younghoon Kim, Kyle Thayer, Gabriella Silva Gorsky and Jeffrey Heer University of Washington orange brown red yellow green pink English gray black purple blue 갈 빨강 노랑 주황 연두 자주 초록 회 분홍 Korean 청록 보라 하늘 검정 남 연보라 파랑 Figure 1: Maximum probability maps of English and Korean color terms. Each point represents a 10 × 10 × 10 bin in CIELAB color space. Larger points have a greater likelihood of agreement on a single term. Each bin is colored using the average color of the most probable name term. Bins with insufficient data (< 4 terms) are left blank. English has 10 clusters corresponding to basic English color terms [BK69], whereas Korean exhibits additional clusters for ¨ ( ), ­] ( ), 자주 ( ), X늘 ( ), 연P ( ), and 연보| ( ). Abstract Color names facilitate the identification and communication of colors, but may vary across languages. We contribute a set of human color name judgments across 14 common written languages and build probabilistic models that find different sets of nameable (salient) colors across languages. For example, we observe that unlike English and Chinese, Russian and Korean have more than one nameable blue color among fully-saturated RGB colors. In addition, we extend these probabilistic models to translate color terms from one language to another via a shared perceptual color space. We compare Korean-English trans- lations from our model to those from online translation tools and find that our method better preserves perceptual similarity of the colors corresponding to the source and target terms.
    [Show full text]
  • Development and Difference in Germanic Colour Semantics
    See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264981573 Two kinds of pink: development and difference in Germanic colour semantics ARTICLE in LANGUAGE SCIENCES · AUGUST 2014 Impact Factor: 0.44 · DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2014.07.007 CITATIONS READS 3 87 8 AUTHORS, INCLUDING: Cornelia van Scherpenberg Þórhalla Guðmundsdóttir Beck Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Mun… University of Iceland 3 PUBLICATIONS 4 CITATIONS 5 PUBLICATIONS 5 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Linnaea Stockall Matthew Whelpton Queen Mary, University of London University of Iceland 18 PUBLICATIONS 137 CITATIONS 13 PUBLICATIONS 29 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Available from: Linnaea Stockall Retrieved on: 03 March 2016 Language Sciences xxx (2014) 1–16 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Language Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci Two kinds of pink: development and difference in Germanic colour semantics Susanne Vejdemo a,*, Carsten Levisen b, Cornelia van Scherpenberg c, þórhalla Guðmundsdóttir Beck d, Åshild Næss e, Martina Zimmermann f, Linnaea Stockall g, Matthew Whelpton h a Stockholm University, Department of Linguistics, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden b Linguistics and Semiotics, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 2, Bygning 1485-335, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark c Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 München, Germany d University of Iceland, Háskóli Íslands, Sæmundargötu 2, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland
    [Show full text]
  • Berlin and Kay Theory
    Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8_62-2 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Berlin and Kay Theory C.L. Hardin* Department of Philosophy, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA Definition The Berlin-Kay theory of basic color terms maintains that the world’s languages share all or part of a common stock of color concepts and that terms for these concepts evolve in a constrained order. Basic Color Terms In 1969 Brent Berlin and Paul Kay advanced a theory of cross-cultural color concepts centered on the notion of a basic color term [1]. A basic color term (BCT) is a color word that is applicable to a wide class of objects (unlike blonde), is monolexemic (unlike light blue), and is reliably used by most native speakers (unlike chartreuse). The languages of modern industrial societies have thousands of color words, but only a very slender stock of basic color terms. English has 11: red, yellow, green, blue, black, white, gray, orange, brown, pink, and purple. Slavic languages have 12, with separate basic terms for light blue and dark blue. In unwritten and tribal languages the number of BCTs can be substantially smaller, perhaps as few as two or three, with denotations that span much larger regions of color space than the BCT denotations of major modern languages. Furthermore, reconstructions of the earlier vocabularies of modern languages show that they gain BCTs over time. These typically begin as terms referring to a narrow range of objects and properties, many of them noncolor properties, such as succulence, and gradually take on a more general and abstract meaning, with a pure color sense.
    [Show full text]
  • Color Term Comprehension and the Perception of Focal Color in Young Children
    University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014 1973 Color term comprehension and the perception of focal color in young children. Charles G. Verge University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses Verge, Charles G., "Color term comprehension and the perception of focal color in young children." (1973). Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014. 2050. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses/2050 This thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. COLOR TERM COMPREHENSION AND THE PERCEPTION OF FOCAL COLOR IN YOUNG CHILDREN A thesis presented By CHARLES G. VERGE Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE March 1973 Psychology COLOR TERI^ COMPREHENSION AND THE PERCEPTION OF FOCAL COLOR IN YOUNG CHILDREN A Thesis By CHARLES G. VERGE Approved as to style and content by: March 1973 ABSTRACT Thirty 2-year-old subjects participated in a color per- ception task designed to assess the :i.nfluence of color term comprehension on the perception of "focal" color areas. The subject's task was to choose a color from an array of Munsell color chips consisting of one focal color chip with a series of non focal color chips. Eacn subject was given a color com- prehension and color naming task.
    [Show full text]
  • Greek Color Theory and the Four Elements [Full Text, Not Including Figures] J.L
    University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Greek Color Theory and the Four Elements Art July 2000 Greek Color Theory and the Four Elements [full text, not including figures] J.L. Benson University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/art_jbgc Benson, J.L., "Greek Color Theory and the Four Elements [full text, not including figures]" (2000). Greek Color Theory and the Four Elements. 1. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/art_jbgc/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Art at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Greek Color Theory and the Four Elements by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Cover design by Jeff Belizaire ABOUT THIS BOOK Why does earlier Greek painting (Archaic/Classical) seem so clear and—deceptively— simple while the latest painting (Hellenistic/Graeco-Roman) is so much more complex but also familiar to us? Is there a single, coherent explanation that will cover this remarkable range? What can we recover from ancient documents and practices that can objectively be called “Greek color theory”? Present day historians of ancient art consistently conceive of color in terms of triads: red, yellow, blue or, less often, red, green, blue. This habitude derives ultimately from the color wheel invented by J.W. Goethe some two centuries ago. So familiar and useful is his system that it is only natural to judge the color orientation of the Greeks on its basis. To do so, however, assumes, consciously or not, that the color understanding of our age is the definitive paradigm for that subject.
    [Show full text]
  • Diachronic Trends in Latin's Basic Color Vocabulary
    Diachronic Trends in Latin’s Basic Color Vocabulary Emily Gering University of North Carolina at Greensboro Faculty Mentor: David Wharton University of North Carolina at Greensboro ABSTRACT The Latin language contains a number of synonymous terms in its basic color categories. The goal of this essay is to trace the diachronic trends of such terms; to discover which term, if any, is the favored term for a color category; and to determine whether it became established as such in sequence with the Universal Evolution (UE) model. I examine the frequencies of all potentially-basic color terms in the extant texts of five authors chosen to represent a span of about six hundred years: Plautus, Cato the Elder, Cicero, Seneca, and Saint Jerome. My initial hypothesis was that niger was displacing ater as the basic Black term; a similar shift was occurring as candidus displaced albus as the default White term; and other shifts between Red and Yellow terms are uncertain. The hypothesis that niger was displacing ater proved to be accurate; niger increased from occurring only incidentally in Plautus (third century BCE) to being the dominant Black term in Seneca (first century CE), although it did not completely displace ater until late antiquity. In Plautus, candidus and albus formed an equal percentage of total color vocabulary, and displayed only slightly divergent trends, which may reflect the use of albus for “matte white” and candidus for “shiny white.” Ruber was the favored Red term, but it was not displacing other Red terms, nor were the other Red terms displacing each other.
    [Show full text]
  • Tutorial on the Importance of Color in Language and Culture
    Tutorial on the Importance of Color in Language and Culture James A. Schirillo Department of Psychology, Wake Forest University, Winston–Salem, NC 27109 Received 11 December 1998; revised 30 July 1999; accepted 13 July 2000 Abstract: This tutorial examines how people of various the eye are considered first. A brief description follows of cultures classify different colors as belonging together un- the medium that transposes these external events into per- der common color names. This is addressed by examining ceptions, that is, the human biology that regulates color Berlin and Kay’s (1969) hierarchical classification scheme. vision. Once the physics of external reality and the biolog- Special attention is paid to the additional five (derived) ical filter that processes those energies has been outlined, a color terms (i.e., brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray) discussion of Berlin & Kay’s 1969 hypothesis1 and support- that must be added to Herings’ six primaries (i.e., white, ing works are used to tie color categorization to linguistics. black, red, green, yellow, blue) to constitute Berlin and Since Berlin & Kay’s work has received several significant Kay’s basic color terms. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Col Res criticisms, a number of counterexamples follow. What is Appl, 26, 179–192, 2001 most significant regarding Berlin & Kay’s hypothesis is that as cultures develop, they acquire additional color names in Key words: color naming; language; culture; evolution; systematic order. Berlin & Kay initially postulated that this development was due to successive encoding of color foci, while in later work they considered it to be due to the successive parti- INTRODUCTION tioning of color space.
    [Show full text]
  • Colour Terms in Advertisements
    Armenian Folia Anglistika Linguistics Colour Terms in Advertisements Kristine Harutyunyan Yerevan State University Abstract The present article focuses on the peculiarities of the usage of colour terminology in advertisements. We live in a colourful world and there are great many colour words to describe it. We also live in a world where advertisement has become an accompanying phenomenon of our everyday life. It is obvious that the language of advertising has its specific features and it seems worth trying to reveal the role and the meaning of the colours used in advertisements. Colour terms are known to be linguistic universals which have certain associations attached to each of them. We may suppose that the colours that are mostly used in the advertisements are the basic colour terms. The spheres where we expect to find wider usage of colour terms should be the ones connected with fashion industry. Key words: colour terms, advertisements, hue, lightness, saturation, symbolism. Introduction The study of colour terms has a very long history. Nearly 2,500 years ago, colour was systematically studied for the first time as a basic cognitive domain. As might be expected, different research traditions employ different methods: work with colour arrays (naming, mapping, identifying focal point) is a traditional anthropological method; response time, consistency and consensus of naming, and elicited lists are often used by psychologists; frequency in texts, morphology and word length have been part of the linguistic approach. Our aim is to study the colour terms in advertisements. We should note that advertisement is characterized mainly by the following aspects: concision, clarity, frequent use of comparative and superlative constructions, neologism, repetition, non-sophistication, and application of rhetorical devices.
    [Show full text]
  • The Linguistic Relativity of Color by Dina Bseiso, December 2015 While
    The Linguistic Relativity of Color by Dina Bseiso, December 2015 While color is a salient property of a multitude of resources, it is also a resource whose properties are defined contingently upon the lens in which color is being perceived through. Like many others, I benefit from being able to perceive a rainbow of colors, and even occasionally the lack of color, in my day-to-day living. Color is organized quite differently depending on the context in which it is being used, and for what purpose. The lenses used to organize color in this report are grossly in language, and just touched upon as an artifact of being biological creatures with certain studied and known physiological phenomena. These lenses represent two contending perspectives of what is known as linguistic relativity of color — the relativist and universalist perspectives respectively. More specifically, the relativist view is that the language we know shapes how we view the world around us; so therefore, if there does not exist a specific color term for a particular hue, we do not know how else to refer to it other than through analogy8. A rather strict take on the relativist view is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which asserts that people are incapable of perceiving differences between colors that do not have separate color categories in their language, which has been shown to be largely false, yet mildly supported by timed experiments of color distinction. To contrast, the universalist view states how we view color is already shaped prior to any language learning due to our shared vision neurophysiology — in our rods and cones, and prior to any hemispherical influences (i.e.
    [Show full text]
  • Improving Color Identification of Awarded Orchids by Cynthia Hill and Helmut Rohrl Published in Awards Quarterly, Vol
    Improving Color Identification of Awarded Orchids By Cynthia Hill and Helmut Rohrl Published in Awards Quarterly, Vol. 32, Vol. 2, 2001, page 119-120 When an orchid receives an American Orchid Society (AOS) award, it is the responsibility of the awarding team of judges to write a concise description of the inflorescence. The written description generally includes flower number and presentation, a detailed description of color(s), as well as the substance and texture of the flower. For example, the description of Brassolaeliocattleya Streeter’s Sunrise ‘Myriah’s Sunset’, HCC/AOS reads: “Four flowers on one inflorescence; sepals and petals butterscotch orange overlaid with smoky lavender; lip deep yellow edged with smoky lavender, center lobe apex marked with oxblood red; substance good; texture sparkling…” This is followed by precise measurement of specific areas of the flower, yielding overall size and relative proportion of the parts, e.g.: “…Nat. spr. 9.8 cm, 10.0 cm vert; ds 2.2 cm w, 6.4 cm 1, pet 3.7 cm w, 5.7 cm 1; ls 2.2 cm w, 5.6 cm 1; lip 3.5 cm w, 4.7 cm 1.” The entire description (sometimes accompanied by a black-and-white or color photograph) is then published in Awards Quarterly and used as a benchmark reference by other AOS judging teams evaluating comparable phenotypes. Ideally, a well-written description leads the reader to clearly visualize that specific plant and all of its floral attributes. For this reason, the plant must be described in the most tangible terms possible, and in terms that are unequivocal and uniformly recognized by AOS judges in any location, and at any time.
    [Show full text]
  • Did Your Primary School Teacher Lie to You About Color? 14 June 2019, by Neil Dodgson
    Did your primary school teacher lie to you about color? 14 June 2019, by Neil Dodgson Magenta is somewhere between red, purple and pink. And in that explanation of cyan and magenta lies the linguistic problem. Neither cyan nor magenta is a basic color term, whereas red, purple, green, blue, pink, and yellow all are. Itten's primaries are basic color terms and Itten uses the language of color to define the primaries that he uses. In the late 1960s, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay proposed the theory that there are basic color terms in all languages. These are the terms that you teach small children and which produce Credit: Victoria University of Wellington categories of color that are irreducible, that is, all other color terms are considered, by most speakers of the language, to be variations on these basic color terms. In English, and most other European At primary school you were taught that there are languages, there are eleven basic color terms: red, three primary colors: red, yellow and blue, and that orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, you can mix these to make all other colors. This is black, gray, and white. As an example of the not true. Or rather, it is only a rough approximation irreducibility of these basic terms, consider how to the truth. My recent article, published in the difficult it is to convince a child that brown is really Journal of Perceptual Imaging, digs into the history dark orange or that pink is light red. You may teach of color wheels and color mixing to find that the a particular child or student to make finer truth is more complex and more interesting.
    [Show full text]
  • Color Naming Across Languages Reflects Color Use
    Color naming across languages reflects color use Edward Gibsona,2, Richard Futrella, Julian Jara-Ettingera,1, Kyle Mahowalda, Leon Bergena, Sivalogeswaran Ratnasingamb, Mitchell Gibsona, Steven T. Piantadosic, and Bevil R. Conwayb,2 aDepartment of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139; bLaboratory of Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute and National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892; and cDepartment of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627 Edited by Dale Purves, Duke University, Durham, NC, and approved August 15, 2017 (received for review November 30, 2016) What determines how languages categorize colors? We analyzed paradigm on separate participants, where participants were results of the World Color Survey (WCS) of 110 languages to show constrained to only say the most common terms we obtained in that despite gross differences across languages, communication of the free-choice paradigm. We conducted experiments in three chromatic chips is always better for warm colors (yellows/reds) than groups: the Tsimane’ people, an indigenous nonindustrialized cool colors (blues/greens). We present an analysis of color statistics in Amazonian group consisting of about 6,000 people from low- a large databank of natural images curated by human observers for land Bolivia who live by farming, hunting, and foraging for sub- salient objects and show that objects tend to have warm rather than sistence (14); English speakers in the United States; and Bolivian- ’ ’ cool colors. These results suggest that the cross-linguistic similarity in Spanish speakers in Bolivia, neighboring the Tsimane .Tsimane is color-naming efficiency reflects colors of universal usefulness and one of two languages in an isolate language family (Mosetenan).
    [Show full text]