In 1969, Berlin and Kay proposed that there exist crosscultural universals in the form of basic color terms. To test this hypothesis, the World Color Survey (WCS) collected color naming data from 110 non-industrial societies, identifying regularities in the structure of languages with different numbers of terms. This leaves us with the question of where these universals come from. We use a simp...

This article describes color naming by 51 American English-speaking informants. A free-naming task produced 122 monolexemic color terms, with which informants named the 330 Munsell samples from the World Color Survey. Cluster analysis consolidated those terms into a glossary of 20 named color categories: the 11 Basic Color Term (BCT) categories of Berlin and Kay (1969, p. 2) plus nine nonbasic ...

conclusions the findings of this study indicate that older children are more proficient in comprehension of color words compared to younger children, and girls are more proficient than boys. the two easiest and two most difficult color words for children to comprehend within the 3 age groups were “black” and “red” and “phosphoric-green” and “turquoise-blue,” respectively. there was a positive r...

The accepted model of color naming postulates that 11 “basic” color terms representing 11 common perceptual experiences show increased processing salience due to a theorized linkage between perception, visual neurophysiology, and cognition. We tested this theory, originally proposed by Berlin and Kay in 1969. Experiment 1 tested salience by comparing unconstrained color naming across two langua...

The congenital color vision deficient (CVD) generally demonstrates difficulties in color naming tasks. In our study we investigated color naming properties and uncertainties of a relatively large group of red-green CVDs using quasi monochromatic stimuli and seven basic color terms. The results show a large variability in color naming for the CVD when contrasted to normal color vision and simila...