ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
What we talk about when we talk about colors.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 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
- Perception and communication of relevant colours in paintings by observers with colour vision deficiencies.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Human and primate categorical understanding of color.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- AvianLexiconAtlas: A database of descriptive categories of English-language bird names around the world.PloS one · 2025Article
- 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
- The color communication game.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Invariant categorical color regions across illuminant change coincide with focal colors.Journal of vision · 2023Article
- Sunlight exposure cannot explain "grue" languages.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Reply to: Sunlight exposure cannot explain "grue" languages.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
- Communicative Efficiency or Iconic Learning: Do Acquisition and Communicative Pressures Interact to Shape Colour- Naming Systems?Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Pareto-Optimal Clustering with the Primal Deterministic Information Bottleneck.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Color sorting and color term evolution.Color research and applicationArticle
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Names for colors vary widely across languages, but color categories are remarkably consistent. Shared mechanisms of color perception help explain consistent partitions of visible light into discrete color vocabularies. But the mappings from colors to words are not identical across languages, which may reflect communicative needs-how often speakers must refer to objects of different color. Here we quantify the communicative needs of colors in 130 different languages by developing an inference algorithm for this problem. We find that communicative needs are not uniform: Some regions of color space exhibit 30-fold greater demand for communication than other regions. The regions of greatest demand correlate with the colors of salient objects, including ripe fruits in primate diets. Our analysis also reveals a hidden diversity in the communicative needs of colors across different languages, which is partly explained by differences in geographic location and the local biogeography of linguistic communities. Accounting for language-specific, nonuniform communicative needs improves predictions for how a language maps colors to words, and how these mappings vary across languages. Our account closes an important gap in the compression theory of color naming, while opening directions to study cross-cultural variation in the need to communicate different colors and its impact on the cultural evolution of color categories.
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