ArticlePloS one2015
Individual biases, cultural evolution, and the statistical nature of language universals: the case of colour naming systems.
Article in PloS one, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- When the City Speaks: How Urban Form Shapes the Cultural Transmission of Spatial Conceptualization.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Perceptual constraints on colours induce the universality of linguistic colour categorisation.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Domain learning naming game for color categorization.PloS one · 2017Article
- Focal colors across languages are representative members of color categories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A computational model has recently shown how this could be the case, focusing on the paradigmatic example of the universal properties of colour naming patterns, and producing results in quantitative agreement with the experimental data. Here we investigate the role of an individual perceptual bias in the framework of the model. We study how, and to what extent, the structure of the bias influences the corresponding linguistic universal patterns. We show that the cultural history of a group of speakers introduces population-specific constraints that act against the pressure for uniformity arising from the individual bias, and we clarify the interplay between these two forces.
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