There Is More Than Meets the Eye: The Dual Role of Perception in Shaping Color Lexicons

Color's ultimate physical reality is continuous, and yet human beings "cut" this continuum into a rather small number of categories reflected in their languages' color lexicon. There are striking cross-linguistic differences in the color lexicon, which are primarily attributed to differences in communicative needs, but also striking commonalities, attributed to a common human perceptual system. Here, we challenge this notion of a uniform perceptual structure by experimentally comparing participants from two populations, French from France and Himba from Namibia. They differ in the amount of exposure to ultraviolet radiation, which influences color perception through its effects on eye physiology cumulatively during the individual's lifetime. We found, even after controlling for potential confounds at the individual, color-naming, and cultural levels, that color perception is affected by age significantly more in the Himba participants, suggesting that besides communicative needs, perceptual structure can play a dual role, contributing to both cross-linguistic universals and differences in the color lexicon.