ArticleCognition2020
Communication efficiency of color naming across languages provides a new framework for the evolution of color terms.
Article in Cognition, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
17 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
- 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
- Visual search for warm and cool colors.Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision · 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
- Ensemble percepts of colored targets among distractors are influenced by hue similarity, not categorical identity.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Concepts Are Restructured During Language Contact: The Birth of Blue and Other Color Concepts in Tsimane'-Spanish Bilinguals.Psychological science · 2023Article
- Corvids optimize working memory by categorizing continuous stimuli.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Color appearance and the end of Hering's Opponent-Colors Theory.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2023Review
- Article
- Communicative Efficiency or Iconic Learning: Do Acquisition and Communicative Pressures Interact to Shape Colour- Naming Systems?Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Swipes and Saves: A Taxonomy of Factors Influencing Aesthetic Assessments and Perceived Beauty of Mobile Phone Photographs.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- What we talk about when we talk about colors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Colors.Current biology : CB · 2021Article
- Color Space Geometry Uncovered with Magnetoencephalography.Current biology : CB · 2021Article
- Basic color categories in Mandarin Chinese revealed by cluster analysis.Journal of vision · 2020Article
- Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Languages vary in their number of color terms. A widely accepted theory proposes that languages evolve, acquiring color terms in a stereotyped sequence. This theory, by Berlin and Kay (BK), is supported by analyzing best exemplars ("focal colors") of basic color terms in the World Color Survey (WCS) of 110 languages. But the instructions of the WCS were complex and the color chips confounded hue and saturation, which likely impacted focal-color selection. In addition, it is now known that even so-called early-stage languages nonetheless have a complete representation of color distributed across the population. These facts undermine the BK theory. Here we revisit the evolution of color terms using original color-naming data obtained with simple instructions in Tsimane', an Amazonian culture that has limited contact with industrialized society. We also collected data in Bolivian-Spanish speakers and English speakers. We discovered that information theory analysis of color-naming data was not influenced by color-chip saturation, which motivated a new analysis of the WCS data. Embedded within a universal pattern in which warm colors (reds, oranges) are always communicated more efficiently than cool colors (blues, greens), as languages increase in overall communicative efficiency about color, some colors undergo greater increases in communication efficiency compared to others. Communication efficiency increases first for yellow, then brown, then purple. The present analyses and results provide a new framework for understanding the evolution of color terms: what varies among cultures is not whether colors are seen differently, but the extent to which color is useful.
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