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What we talk about when we talk about colors
- Source :
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021.
-
Abstract
- Significance Do we talk about some colors more often than others? And do the colors we communicate about most frequently vary across cultures? A classic finding shows that languages around the world partition colors into words in remarkably similar, although not identical, ways. The biology of human color perception helps explain similar color vocabularies across languages, but less is known about how often speakers need to reference different colors. The inference method we develop reveals extensive variation in communicative needs across colors, and a diversity in needs across 130 languages, which helps explain variation in their color vocabularies. Our results open the door to studying cross-cultural variation in demands on different colors, and factors that drive color demands in linguistic communities.<br />Names for colors vary widely across languages, but color categories are remarkably consistent. Shared mechanisms of color perception help explain consistent partitions of visible light into discrete color vocabularies. But the mappings from colors to words are not identical across languages, which may reflect communicative needs—how often speakers must refer to objects of different color. Here we quantify the communicative needs of colors in 130 different languages by developing an inference algorithm for this problem. We find that communicative needs are not uniform: Some regions of color space exhibit 30-fold greater demand for communication than other regions. The regions of greatest demand correlate with the colors of salient objects, including ripe fruits in primate diets. Our analysis also reveals a hidden diversity in the communicative needs of colors across different languages, which is partly explained by differences in geographic location and the local biogeography of linguistic communities. Accounting for language-specific, nonuniform communicative needs improves predictions for how a language maps colors to words, and how these mappings vary across languages. Our account closes an important gap in the compression theory of color naming, while opening directions to study cross-cultural variation in the need to communicate different colors and its impact on the cultural evolution of color categories.
- Subjects :
- Cross-Cultural Comparison
Collective behavior
Color vision
Computer science
media_common.quotation_subject
ComputingMethodologies_IMAGEPROCESSINGANDCOMPUTERVISION
Color
Social Sciences
Inference
Color space
Information theory
Choice Behavior
collective behavior
Discrimination, Psychological
Cultural Evolution
Humans
Sociocultural evolution
Language
information theory
media_common
Multidisciplinary
Communication
Biological Sciences
Linguistics
language evolution
Variation (linguistics)
Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Color Perception
color categories
Diversity (politics)
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 10916490 and 00278424
- Volume :
- 118
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....60b71fe270190e5496bd8d1a408dc1f4