Sub sections:
The Colors of the Rainbow: relationships between culture, thought and colour language
Semester II 2005
Dr Debi Roberson
robedd@essex.ac.uk
(Education 139, 28 November, 12 noon)
Abstract
Humans seem to have a compulsion for grouping things in the world into categories and for naming the categories that they make. Young children spontaneously begin to sort objects into groups at around the time that they enter the 'naming spurt' (a sudden increase in vocabulary growth at around 18 months). There could be some obvious natural partitions existing in the world that human categorization simply mirrors, in which case such divisions would provide a universal basis for categorization. Alternatively, differing cultural needs and knowledge systems might drive different societies to make different groupings. Colour has been a fruitful testing ground for examining the alternative possibilities since the same range of colours is seen by all humans with normal trichromatic colour vision, but different languages divide that same range into different linguistic categories. We present a series of cross-cultural and developmental experimental evidence supporting the hypothesis that culture, through language, affects the way we perceive and represent the world.