Blue is in the Eye of the Beholder: A Cross-Linguistic Study on Color Perception and Memory

The linguistic relativity hypothesis states that the language one speaks affects how one thinks. Color categorization across languages has often been studied in order to examine the hypothesis. However, those studies often rely on uniform color stimuli or focus on one aspect of cognition. In experiment one, we examined how Russian- and English-speaking participants rated the color of blue/grey eyes perceptually and from memory. Russian-speakers are more likely to describe such eyes as grey, whereas English-speakers are more likely to describe them as blue. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. In the first condition (perception), participants saw the color scale and an eye picture simultaneously and then chose the color that best matched the picture. In the second condition (memory), participants matched the color of an eye to the color scale from memory. The third condition (label) was similar to the second, except participants labeled the eye orally before matching the color from memory. A Bayesian analysis showed that Russian-speakers rated the eyes greyer than did English-speakers in the memory and label conditions, but not perception conditions. In experiment two, we examined how short-term linguistic memory traces are related to color memory. Overall, results find nuanced support for the linguistic relativity hypothesis: language affects color memory more than color perception.