Most current accounts of color word acquisition propose that the delay between children's first production of color words and adult-like understanding is due to problems abstracting color as a domain of meaning. Here we present evidence against this hypothesis, and show that, from the time children produce color words in a labeling task they use them to represent color. In Experiment 1, an anal...

Most current accounts of color word acquisition propose that the delay between children’s first production of color words and adult-like understanding is due to problems abstracting color as a domain of meaning. Here we present evidence against this hypothesis, and show that, from the time children produce color words in a labeling task they use them to represent color. In Experiment 1, an ...

We investigated the impact of attention during encoding on later retrieval. During study, participants read some words aloud (ignoring the print color) and named the print color of other words aloud (ignoring the word). Then one of two memory tests was administered. The explicit test--recognition--required conscious recollection of whether a word was studied. Previously read words were recogniz...

We present an automatic framework to extract color palettes from words. This is a novel approach in comparison to existing solutions, e.g. manual creation or extraction from images. The associations between words and colors are deduced from a large database of 6 million tagged images using a scalable data-mining technique. The palette creation can be constrained by the user to achieve a desired...

Most current accounts of color word acquisition propose that the delay between children’s first production of color words and adult-like understanding is due to problems abstracting color as a domain of meaning. Here we present evidence against this hypothesis, and show that, from the time children produce color words in a labeling task they use them to represent color. In Experiment 1, an anal...

How does aging impact relations between emotion, memory, and attention? To address this question, young and older adults named the font colors of taboo and neutral words, some of which recurred in the same font color or screen location throughout two color-naming experiments. The results indicated longer color-naming response times (RTs) for taboo than neutral base-words (taboo Stroop interfere...

In two experiments, we investigate whether, in English, children’s difficulty learning color adjectives might stem from their overwhelming tendency to be used in prenominal position (e.g., “blue cup”), where word order causes the adjective to arrive ahead of its meaning, rather than post-nominal presentation (e.g., “the cup is blue”), where the meaning cues the word. We consider factors of sequ...

This study reported the role of orthography in semantic activation processes of Chinese single-character words. Eighteen native Chinese speaking adults were recruited to take part in a Stroop experiment consisting of one-character color words and pseudowords which were orthographically similar to these color words. Classic behavioral Stroop effects, namely longer reaction times for incongruent ...

In the Stroop task, incongruent color associates (e.g., LAKE) interfere more with color identification than neutral words do (e.g., SEAT). However, color associates have historically been related to colors in the response set. Response set membership is an important factor in Stroop interference, because color words in the response set interfere more than color words not in the response set. It...

Learning color words is a difficult problem for young children. Because color is abstract, this difficulty has been attributed to challenges in integrating over heterogeneous objects to discover color as a dimension of reference. On this account, learning that color words refer to the color dimension is slow, but subsequently mapping these words to particular shades is fast. Recent work suggest...