ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Color naming across languages reflects color use.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 68 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
68 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Do we feel colours? A systematic review of 128 years of psychological research linking colours and emotions.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Pooled it
- Human cerebral arterial morphogenesis explored by 3D microscopic imaging of cleared embryos: Bridging the gap between embryonic and adult anatomy.Journal of anatomy · 2026Article
- When the City Speaks: How Urban Form Shapes the Cultural Transmission of Spatial Conceptualization.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Search Efficiency Drives Reference Production Across Modalities, But Colour Is Special.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Speakers Use More Redundant Color Adjectives When Speaking to Children Than Adults.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- The representation of object concepts across the brain.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Multilingual Computational Models Capture a Shared Meaning Component in Brain Responses across 21 Languages.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Warm versus cool colors and their relation to color perception.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Perception and communication of relevant colours in paintings by observers with colour vision deficiencies.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Comparing color qualia structures through a similarity task in young children versus adults.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Human and primate categorical understanding of color.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The origin of color categories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Dynamic Field Theory of Executive Function: Identifying Early Neurocognitive Markers.Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development · 2024Article
- Ensemble percepts of colored targets among distractors are influenced by hue similarity, not categorical identity.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Review
- 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
- Editorial: The adaptive value of languages: non-linguistic causes of language diversity, volume II.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Exploring perceptions of extreme environments and extremophiles in Chilean schoolchildren: an ethnographic study.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Concepts Are Restructured During Language Contact: The Birth of Blue and Other Color Concepts in Tsimane'-Spanish Bilinguals.Psychological science · 2023Article
- Spatial communication systems across languages reflect universal action constraints.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
8 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
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Abstract
What determines how languages categorize colors? We analyzed results of the World Color Survey (WCS) of 110 languages to show that despite gross differences across languages, communication of chromatic chips is always better for warm colors (yellows/reds) than cool colors (blues/greens). We present an analysis of color statistics in a large databank of natural images curated by human observers for salient objects and show that objects tend to have warm rather than cool colors. These results suggest that the cross-linguistic similarity in color-naming efficiency reflects colors of universal usefulness and provide an account of a principle (color use) that governs how color categories come about. We show that potential methodological issues with the WCS do not corrupt information-theoretic analyses, by collecting original data using two extreme versions of the color-naming task, in three groups: the Tsimane', a remote Amazonian hunter-gatherer isolate; Bolivian-Spanish speakers; and English speakers. These data also enabled us to test another prediction of the color-usefulness hypothesis: that differences in color categorization between languages are caused by differences in overall usefulness of color to a culture. In support, we found that color naming among Tsimane' had relatively low communicative efficiency, and the Tsimane' were less likely to use color terms when describing familiar objects. Color-naming among Tsimane' was boosted when naming artificially colored objects compared with natural objects, suggesting that industrialization promotes color usefulness.
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