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World Color Survey color naming reveals universal motifs and their within-language diversity.

ABSTRACT: We analyzed the color terms in the World Color Survey (WCS) (www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/), a large color-naming database obtained from informants of mostly unwritten languages spoken in preindustrialized cultures that have had limited contact with modern, industrialized society. The color naming idiolects of 2,367 WCS informants fall into three to six "motifs," where each motif is a different color-naming system based on a subset of a universal glossary of 11 color terms. These motifs are universal in that they occur worldwide, with some individual variation, in completely unrelated languages. Strikingly, these few motifs are distributed across the WCS informants in such a way that multiple motifs occur in most languages. Thus, the culture a speaker comes from does not completely determine how he or she will use color terms. An analysis of the modern patterns of motif usage in the WCS languages, based on the assumption that they reflect historical patterns of color term evolution, suggests that color lexicons have changed over time in a complex but orderly way. The worldwide distribution of the motifs and the cooccurrence of multiple motifs within languages suggest that universal processes control the naming of colors.

SUBMITTER: Lindsey DT

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2775038 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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World Color Survey color naming reveals universal motifs and their within-language diversity.

Lindsey Delwin T DT Brown Angela M AM

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20091109 47

We analyzed the color terms in the World Color Survey (WCS) (www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/), a large color-naming database obtained from informants of mostly unwritten languages spoken in preindustrialized cultures that have had limited contact with modern, industrialized society. The color naming idiolects of 2,367 WCS informants fall into three to six "motifs," where each motif is a different color-naming system based on a subset of a universal glossary of 11 color terms. These motifs are univers ...[more]

PMID: 19901327

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Project description:While embodied approaches of cognition have proved to be successful in explaining concrete concepts and words, they have more difficulties in accounting for abstract concepts and words, and several proposals have been put forward. This work aims to test the Words As Tools proposal, according to which both abstract and concrete concepts are grounded in perception, action and emotional systems, but linguistic information is more important for abstract than for concrete concept representation, due to the different ways they are acquired: while for the acquisition of the latter linguistic information might play a role, for the acquisition of the former it is instead crucial. We investigated the acquisition of concrete and abstract concepts and words, and verified its impact on conceptual representation. In Experiment 1, participants explored and categorized novel concrete and abstract entities, and were taught a novel label for each category. Later they performed a categorical recognition task and an image-word matching task to verify a) whether and how the introduction of language changed the previously formed categories, b) whether language had a major weight for abstract than for concrete words representation, and c) whether this difference had consequences on bodily responses. The results confirm that, even though both concrete and abstract concepts are grounded, language facilitates the acquisition of the latter and plays a major role in their representation, resulting in faster responses with the mouth, typically associated with language production. Experiment 2 was a rating test aiming to verify whether the findings of Experiment 1 were simply due to heterogeneity, i.e. to the fact that the members of abstract categories were more heterogeneous than those of concrete categories. The results confirmed the effectiveness of our operationalization, showing that abstract concepts are more associated with the mouth and concrete ones with the hand, independently from heterogeneity.

Dataset Information

World Color Survey color naming reveals universal motifs and their within-language diversity.

Publications

World Color Survey color naming reveals universal motifs and their within-language diversity.

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