A Numerical Approach for Defining Basic Color Terms and Color Category Best Exemplars

A new method is presented for the identification of basic color terms (BCTs) from a language’s color-naming data. A function is defined to measure how well a term is understood in a communicating population. A threshold value is then constructed for this function to separate basic terms from other terms. Also, a new mathematical method is proposed and analyzed for determining the best exemplar associated with a basic color term. Using data from 110 societies provided by the World Color Survey, comparisons are made between our methods and other known studies. The comparisons suggest a new definition of “basicness” which mostly agrees with the typical definition due to Kay and colleagues (B. Berlin, T. Regier, and other colleagues) found in the color categorization literature, but which has the advantage of not relying on syntactic or semantic features of languages or color lexicons, and therefore permits a methodology that is generalizable to other category domains for which a construct of “basicness” plays a role. Cognitive psychology theory suggests that humans conceptualize worldly objects using relational frameworks that resemble hierarchical models of classification. These intuitive and compelling hierarchies provide nested ways of classifying and organizing things in the world according to varying levels of specificity. Examples of different relational hierarchy levels are: superordinate 1 MBS TECHNICAL REPORT 16-02