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Related Experiment Videos

Linguistic relativism and colour cognition.

Michael Pilling1, Ian R L Davies

  • 1University of Surrey, UK. m.pilling@open.ac.uk

British Journal of Psychology (London, England : 1953)
|November 6, 2004
PubMed
Summary

Language influences color perception, with English speakers showing greater visual search costs for similar color categories than Ndonga speakers. This suggests language modulates universal color cognition with some relativist effects.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • The linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf, 1956) posits that language influences thought.
  • Cross-linguistic color term differences may impact color cognition.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To test the linguistic relativity hypothesis by comparing English and Ndonga speakers on color cognition tasks.
  • To investigate how differing color lexicons affect perception and processing.

Main Methods:

  • Participants: Native English and Ndonga speakers.
  • Tasks: Color sorting, triads, and visual search.
  • Stimuli: Colors chosen to exploit differences in English and Ndonga color lexicons (e.g., absence of basic terms for orange, pink, purple in Ndonga).

Main Results:

  • Sorting task: Speakers grouped nominally similar colors together more often.
  • Triads task: Speakers identified their language's nominal color isolate as most different.
  • Visual search task: English speakers exhibited a greater speed 'cost' with within-category distractors compared to Ndonga speakers.

Conclusions:

  • Data suggest a universal component in color cognition modulated by language-specific influences.
  • Differences in visual search indicate language affects both pre-attentive (indirect) and online (direct) cognitive processes.

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