ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Phylogenetic approach to the evolution of color term systems.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Symmetry in category systems across languages.Nature communications · 2026Article
- History constrains the evolution of efficient color naming, enabling historical inference.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Phylogenetic insight into the origin of tones.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Phylogenetic signal and rate of evolutionary change in language structures.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Curating and extending data for language comparison in Concepticon and NoRaRe.Open research Europe · 2022Article
- The forms and meanings of grammatical markers support efficient communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Long-term gene-culture coevolution and the human evolutionary transition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Communication efficiency of color naming across languages provides a new framework for the evolution of color terms.Cognition · 2020Article
- Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, advancing data sharing and re-use in comparative linguistics.Scientific data · 2018Article
- Loss of color terms not demonstrated.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Reply to Nash: Color terms are lost, despite missing data.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Pursuing Darwin's curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Human colour in mate choice and competition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Review
Corrections and comments
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- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The naming of colors has long been a topic of interest in the study of human culture and cognition. Color term research has asked diverse questions about thought and communication, but no previous research has used an evolutionary framework. We show that there is broad support for the most influential theory of color term development (that most strongly represented by Berlin and Kay [Berlin B, Kay P (1969) (Univ of California Press, Berkeley, CA)]); however, we find extensive evidence for the loss (as well as gain) of color terms. We find alternative trajectories of color term evolution beyond those considered in the standard theories. These results not only refine our knowledge of how humans lexicalize the color space and how the systems change over time; they illustrate the promise of phylogenetic methods within the domain of cognitive science, and they show how language change interacts with human perception.
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