Individual variations in color-concept space replicate across languages

The cross-cultural nature of color categories and concepts is central to the Berlin-Kay tradition of color-language universalism. In an extension, we examine the cognitive organization of color concepts, the pattern of associations among them, where cross-cultural regularities may also exist. We focus here on individual variations in that pattern. Listing data provide a convenient probe of "associational space" and are amenable to factor analysis using a correlational index of between-list similarity. The rotated factors are "points-of-view": alternative prototypal ways of organizing the concepts and extremes of a spectrum of listing-sequence variation. Points-of-view proved to be comparable for three languages (Hungarian, Italian, Estonian) when visualized with multidimensional scaling. This allowed a similar interpretation of the spectrum of variation in each language, as individual differences in the weight of a conceptual distinction between chromatic and "achromatic" terms, supporting the case for cross-language convergence.