Focal colors across languages are representative members of color categories.

ABSTRACT: Focal colors, or best examples of color terms, have traditionally been viewed as either the underlying source of cross-language color-naming universals or derived from category boundaries that vary widely across languages. Existing data partially support and partially challenge each of these views. Here, we advance a position that synthesizes aspects of these two traditionally opposed positions and accounts for existing data. We do so by linking this debate to more general principles. We show that best examples of named color categories across 112 languages are well-predicted from category extensions by a statistical model of how representative a sample is of a distribution, independently shown to account for patterns of human inference. This model accounts for both universal tendencies an

SUBMITTER: Abbott JT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5056040 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature