Colour studies attracts an increasingly wide range of scholars from across the academic world. Contributions to the present volume offer a broad perspective on the field, ranging from studies of individual languages through papers on art, architecture and heraldry to psychological examinations of aspects of colour categorization, perception and preference. The chapters have been developed from papers and posters presented at a conference on Progress in Colour Studies (PICS08) held at the University of Glasgow. The volume both updates research reported at the earlier PICS04 conference (published by Benjamins in 2006 as Progress in Colour Studies volumes 1 and 2), and introduces new and exciting topics and developments in colour research. In order to make the articles maximally accessible to a multidisciplinary readership, each of the six sections following the initial theoretical papers begins with a short preface describing and drawing together the themes of the chapters within that section. There are seventeen colour illustrations.
Colour studies attracts an increasingly wide range of scholars from across the academic world. Contributions to the present volume offer a broad perspective on the field, ranging from studies of individual languages through papers on art, architecture and heraldry to psychological examinations of aspects of colour categorization, perception and preference. The chapters have been developed from papers and posters presented at a conference on Progress in Colour Studies (PICS08) held at the University of Glasgow. The volume both updates research reported at the earlier PICS04 conference (published by Benjamins in 2006 as Progress in Colour Studies volumes 1 and 2), and introduces new and exciting topics and developments in colour research. In order to make the articles maximally accessible to a multidisciplinary readership, each of the six sections following the initial theoretical papers begins with a short preface describing and drawing together the themes of the chapters within that section. There are seventeen colour illustrations.
Colour (chromatic) vision not only tells us about the colour of surfaces but about the structure of the visual world. One way that colour vision informs us about scene structure is by helping decompose the scene into its material and illumination layers ability. This is underpinned by the visual system’s in-built knowledge that colour variations, and those luminance variations that are aligned with them, tend to be material in origin, whereas ‘pure’ luminance variations tend to arise from illumination. Evidence for such in-built knowledge is that shadows appear to be material in origin when strongly coloured, and colour variations enhance or suppress perceived shape-from-shading in luminance variations depending on their spatial relationships. These findings remind us that many of the benefits of colour vision only emerge when studying the interactions between colour and luminance rather than colour vision in isolation.
Some trends are well-established across the 110 languages surveyed in the World Color Survey (WCS): colour terms are not distributed arbitrarily through ‘colour space’, and, of all possible combinations of terms within a single language, only a few are encountered. WCS data were analyzed to examine departures from these overall trends. To this end, colour terms were represented as locations in a geometrical ‘colour-naming space’ by calculating the ‘co-extension’ or degree of overlap between each pair of terms and applying multidimensional scaling (MDS) to the resulting pattern of relationships. The three-dimensional MDS solution shows departures from the consensus colour-term boundaries as fine structure in the clustering of points. These departures are not completely random, but show some association with language affiliation within language families. The MDS solution also focuses attention on ‘wildcard’ terms, highlighting the role of such terms as transitional stages in models of colour-lexicon development.
The default opinion in philosophy is that we perceive colours to be intrinsic properties of things, properties that objects have regardless of their relations with perceivers. This intrinsic-intuition is considered a crucial objection to relational theories of colour, ones that account for colours in terms of interactions between perceivers and objects. In this paper I defend relationism by analysing the motivation for the intrinsic-intuition. Firstly, I argue that intuition relies on a historically entrenched, passive model of vision. Secondly, I discuss recent psychophysical work on the connection between colour and perceived material stability. Finally, I develop a relationist phenomenology of colour by making the comparison between colour vision and the active – and interactive – sense of touch.
Semioticians like BCT theory, although there is no semiotic theory of BCTs. In Juri Lotman’s modelling framework, one can analyze the BCTs using the formula “language = code + history” and abandon the technical definition of a BCT (a term is basic if it is frequent and passes some hurdles in experimentation). One can paraphrase Lotman’s formula in the following way: “colour language = BCTs and non-BCTs + history of language and culture”. In this formula, the BCTs form the nucleus of the colour code of a language. A semiotic theory of BCTs can be built up using the formula and numerous dichotomies, i.e. language axes, such as static vs. dynamic, syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic, synchronic vs. diachronic, semasiologic vs. onomasiologic, and logical vs. mythological. These axes organize and model the linguistic colour space (or field of colour).
This study aimed to establish the basic colour terms of Arabic and to clarify the status of three Arabic terms for blue: azrock, samawee and khuhlie. Data from a list task were collected from 253 child and 200 adult native Arabic speakers. The patterns of the terms ordered by their frequency from the two samples were essentially the same. In the colour-naming task, the child and adult samples (N = 61 and 60 respectively) had to name a set of 65 colours representing the whole colour palette. Both samples performed similarly. Based on these results, it appears that Arabic has eleven basic colour terms that correspond to Berlin and Kay’s (1969) universal set. In addition, the terms of particular interest – samawee “light blue” and khuhlie “dark blue” – are not basic Arabic colour terms.
The Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech (SCOTS) is a multimedia corpus of Scottish texts, containing a wide range of written and spoken genres from 1945 to the present day. One application of the resource is the study of the use in context of lexical items. This paper explores ways of exploiting SCOTS to investigate the literal, metaphorical and idiomatic uses of colour terms in contemporary Scots. This involves using the integrated analysis tools to consider the collocational patterning of these terms. Other complementary online resources, such as the Dictionary of the Scots Language, are drawn on where appropriate to aid in the interrogation of the complex body of material in the corpus. The paper also outlines the issues involved in using a minority-language corpus for linguistic research.
... la perception de la couleur n’est pas entièrement elucidée quand on en a precisé les domaines physiques et physiologiques. Il y a une histoire humaine de la perception. [colour perception cannot be fully explained merely by a precise specification of the relevant physical and physiological domains; perception is itself a product of human history.](Ignace Meyerson 1957: 7)The vernacular of the Maltese archipelago displays a twelve-term colour paradigm comprising 〈abjad〉 “white”, 〈iswed〉 “black”, 〈aħmar〉 “red”, 〈aħdar〉 “green”, 〈isfar〉 “yellow”, 〈ċelesti〉 “sky blue”, 〈blu〉 “dark blue”, 〈kannella〉 “brown”, 〈roża〉 “pink”, 〈griż〉 “grey”, 〈oranġjo〉 “orange” and 〈vjola〉 “violet”. The dual systemic split of the blue category is a striking feature of Maltese, inviting comparison with the situation obtaining in Italian and other Mediterranean languages. The hybrid (basically Arabic/Italian) composition of the Maltese colour system presents the linguistic researcher with an intriguing cultural synthesis reached by an erstwhile medieval vernacular of Arabic spoken by a small island community exposed to complex linguistic and cultural currents endemic in its regional and local history. The case of Maltese – a Europeanized Arabic vernacular – highlights the crucial role of external influences on cognitive processes monitoring the acquisition of colour categories, and evokes the need for a linguistic model incorporating an elaborate cultural dimension restricting universalist claims commonly associated with the Berlin and Kay paradigm.
Over the past decades, English has had a strong influence on the German language, including the introduction of new words, among them the colour term pink. A first study (Frenzel 2006) investigated German speakers’ perception of rosa/pink as two separate colours rather than different shades of the same colour. The results suggested that pink was causing a shift in the semantic scope of the German colour term rosa. In order to further investigate this change in progress, a corpus of six popular magazines has been compiled since 2006. To objectively determine the application of the two colour terms and their status in German, instances of pink and rosa were selected on the basis of visual support from illustrative material in the magazines. The interpretation of the corpus takes semantic, connotative, contextual, and, particularly, stylistic considerations into account to ascertain the level of basicness of pink in the German language.
The aim of this paper is to present the colour lexicon, including both basic and non-basic terms, found in Kashubian (or Cassubian), a West Slavic language spoken by a relatively small community inhabiting the coast of the Baltic Sea (the Pomorskie Province in Poland). The results of the five-minute elicitation list task show that Kashubian basic colour terms include words for white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, grey and pink. As regards the terms for purple and orange, due to language contact (Kashubian people are bilingual), many informants use the Polish words naming these colours; however, these words may – as the results of the task indicate – be treated as non-basic terms. Besides, it is worth considering whether Kashubian, like Russian and Ukrainian, has evolved a second basic term for blue.
Russian attributive constructions with colour terms are analyzed using the Russian National Corpus. We focus on recently emerging colour terms and their development through to the early twenty-first century. Terms are considered in a construction-based framework, as syntactic-semantic rule pairs, with the emphasis on dynamics in their taxonomic combinability. This is exemplified by constructions denoting the brown category: names for objects, having similar referential meaning, collocate exclusively with one of the contending colour terms, buryj (older) or koričnevyj (newer). We argue that constraints on the usage of a colour term reflect a taxonomic boundary between two classes: the older term applies to natural objects whereas its new rival initially applies to artefacts, later expanding to natural objects. This finding indicates that discourse functioning of emerging colour terms is driven by the cognitive concept of ‘naturalness’. Combinability with nouns from both taxonomic classes is suggested as a supplementary linguistic criterion of colour term basicness.
This paper describes and discusses list and naming experiments designed to ascertain whether Turkish lacivert “dark blue” is a Basic Colour Term (BCT). In addition to the standard sixty-five Color-aid tiles selected by Davies and Corbett (1995), seventeen additional tiles from the purple-blue region of colour space were used for these tasks. Measured against Urmas Sutrop’s cognitive salience index (Sutrop 2001), lacivert attained high salience in the list task. However, the combined results suggest eleven Turkish BCTs (excluding lacivert): yeşil “green”, sarı “yellow”, siyah “black”, kırmızı “red”, mavi “blue”, beyaz “white”, mor “purple”, kahverengi “brown”, pembe “pink”, turuncu “orange” and gri “grey”. Lacivert remains a BCT candidate due to the additional tile used in the naming task, which emerged as dominant.
In 1969 Brent Berlin and Paul Kay suggested that Hungarian may constitute an exception to their theory of universal BCCs by possessing 12 BCTs, including two basic reds. Recently some researchers have proposed that this is also true for Czech. These two genetically distant Central European languages were tested in large empirical-cognitive field studies in 2002, 2003 and 2007. The data collected show that both languages possess exactly 11 BCTs, including one basic term for red. However, it seems that the other term for red is culturally salient on a non-basic level. The puzzle of two salient terms for red could be best understood by drawing attention to the contextual impact on meaning, which is handled by examining syntagmatic and paradigmatic collocations. The case of the two colour terms may represent a unique areal phenomenon.
The hundred most common surnames in Scotland include seven colour terms. Surnames developed from bynames, as extra names given to individuals to distinguish them from others of the same name. Bynames are still in use within some communities, including in some areas of Scotland. By investigating how colours are used in bynaming in a present-day community and comparing this diachronically with the colour bynames from which some surnames originated, it is possible to gain an insight into how people use colours in naming more generally. Interviews were used to investigate bynames synchronically in a close-knit community in the Western Isles of Scotland. This is a bilingual community where both Scottish Gaelic and English are spoken. Gaining examples from interviews, rather than written records, allows for a firmer understanding of why these names were bestowed. This can contribute towards explaining why and how colours were assigned to people in the past.
This chapter examines the use of colour in Francis Bacon’s paintings, focusing particularly on Head VI (1949) and the neglected Triptych (1977). The chapter will demonstrate how Julia Kristeva’s ideas about colour and language, developed in the context of Early Renaissance art, are equally applicable to Bacon’s paintings. They provide a valuable explanation for the artist’s rich palette and his often unusual techniques. Kristeva’s ideas also reveal how Bacon’s chromatics can be understood to trigger memories of the early stages of psychic life. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Bacon’s approach to colour should be understood as contributing to the expression of a sexuality for which no pre-existing visual rhetoric was available.
Making distinctions between colour and colour appearance is essential in exploring the chromatic qualities applied to and in urban and architectural space. As a chromatic landscape, the atmosphere of any urban space is a process of the ongoing construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of ‘colour appearance/shadow’ which is performed through and upon buildings, volumes, spaces, voids, vegetation, and networks of various systems of activities and events, including those of the city’s inhabitants. Considering the diversity of colour appearances and their ephemeral, semi-permanent and permanent aspects, chromatic studies of any particular context need to be built upon aspects of the geographical environment as well as upon issues related to the cultural context and the social memory. Dealing with various environmental concerns in combination with diverse ways of life and cultures requires both openness and a focused approach. In our contemporary age of globalization, addressing culturally and contextually determined chromatic concerns is especially challenging.
This article builds on work previously published (Huxtable 2006: 199–217) to explore three key aspects of the interpretation of armorial colours as written in texts of different genres from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. These key aspects are: (1) the use of a didactic theological discourse that had emerged in the late eleventh century and was concerned with the ‘spiritual’ nature of knighthood (viewing it as a military wing of the priesthood); (2) the use of ideas gleaned from the period’s natural philosophy, concerned with the nature of colour as material (that is, derived from the elemental qualities of bodies); and (3) the use of a creative mode in which complex symbolic and allegorical models of identity could be composed.
Conceptual color metaphor/metonym (CCMM) and our semantic frame of color are motivated through the embodied co-occurrence of color experience as light (RGBu) and as pigment/substance (RYBu [CYM where C= cyan M = Magenta]). Conceptual perceptive mapping establishes a cognitive mechanism to accommodate the positive and negative connotations in relation to both conventional and non-conventional color items. Fifty participants assessed 143 items in four color tasks, involving the eleven universal basic color concepts. The items were divided between the visual and the linguistic aspects: color metaphor and color metonym. This paper investigates the results in the strictly hue dimension in comparison with the conceptualization of temperature warm/cool and brightness light/dark. Furthermore, the presence of a linguistic and a visual ‘afterimage’ effect is analyzed. CCMM theory helps explain how individuals conceptualize and categorize opponent polysemic association functions in the parallel signal/symbol cognitive processing of color and color language.
In this paper I analyze and discuss the effects of the use of specific colour vocabulary employed by five English-speaking travelogue writers visiting northern Scandinavia in the nineteenth century. The number of different colour terms (types) and their frequency of occurrence (tokens) as well as the objects they describe are presented and analyzed. The results show that the objects described most often with specific colour vocabulary are natural objects in the landscape. I argue that this use of colour precision in the discourse can be viewed as reflecting two aspects: first, a desire to add attributes such as exoticness and exclusiveness to the narrative as they are readily available associations in many terms; second, the writers’ engagement and involvement in the landscape they travel through, as the use of specific terminology can be very clearly linked to the writers’ opinions about what is described.
Categorical perception (CP) of colour is demonstrated by faster and more accurate discrimination of colours that cross a category boundary than equivalently spaced colours from the same colour category. Despite a plethora of behavioural research investigating the origin and nature of colour CP, the underlying mechanisms involved in the effect are still unresolved. A recent body of work has made use of the Event-Related Potential (ERP) technique, which involves the measurement of event-related brain potentials at the scalp, enabling exploration of the time course of neural processes that are involved in colour CP. The merits of the ERP technique are presented and five studies that have used this approach to investigate colour CP and colour categorization are reviewed. Each is discussed in relation to the debate about the origin and nature of colour category effects.
There is indirect evidence that categorical colour perception (better discrimination of colours from different categories than those from the same category). For instance, CP can be induced across a newly learned category boundary (Özgen & Davies 2002). Here we replicate and extend Özgen and Davies’s category learning study to try and pinpoint the nature of the changes underlying category learning. Participants learned to divide green into two new categories ‘yellow-green’/‘blue-green’ across four days. The trained group showed CP across the new boundary on a target detection task and this was restricted to the left hemisphere (LH; cf. Drivonikou et al. 2007), whereas the controls did not. The results could suggest that category training produces changes at early stages in visual processing mainly in the LH.
This chapter reports three experiments detailing the influences of stimulus range on color categorization. The results show that both categorization and speed of categorization of colorful stimuli can be influenced by stimulus range. Two potential consequences are considered. First, the influences of stimulus range on color categorization can help explain inconsistencies in the color literature relating to the reliability of color categorization. Second, the same influences appear relevant to the interpretation of experiments investigating color categorical perception.
There is converging evidence for atypical perception in those with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This chapter reviews a series of studies that have initiated the investigation of colour perception in ASD. Research is reviewed that identifies effects of colour on reading speed, visual discrimination and atypical behaviour in ASD. We also reviewed research that suggests that encoding of colour is atypical in those with ASD, and studies that provide evidence for reduced chromatic discrimination in those with the disorder. The theoretical and practical implications of investigations of colour perception in ASD are highlighted. Avenues for further research are suggested that could clarify how those with ASD process and experience the world of colour.
We describe Red-Green dichromats’ use of basic colour terms and compare this with naming errors predicted by metameric equivalence derived from confusion lines in CIE (International Commission on Illumination) coordinates. After briefly reviewing previous work, the results from two tasks – prototype selection and colour term mapping – are presented. Dichromats’ choice of prototype was surprisingly similar to that of typical observers, especially for primary BCTs. More errors were made in the mapping task by including stimuli that were similar in transformed lightness and that shared a confusion line with stimuli that typical observers included in the range of the given term. Additionally, evidence was obtained that use of BCTs was dependent on residual R–G (red-green) mechanism activity.
Synaesthesia is an inherited condition that can give rise to a ‘merging of the senses’. People with synaesthesia experience unusual perceptions (e.g. colours, tastes) when engaged in everyday activities like reading, speaking, listening to music, and so on. Synaesthetic perceptions of colour can be triggered by a range of stimuli, including sounds, tastes, smells, touches, and even linguistic stimuli such as letters, numbers and words. In this paper, I describe work on colour synaesthesia from the Synaesthesia and Sensory Integration Lab at Edinburgh University, where we examine the cognitive, linguistic, and developmental basis of this unusual condition. These data contribute to the emerging view that synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes lie on a continuum of cross-sensory association, but one where neuro-developmental differences allow synaesthetes to experience these colour associations at a conscious level.
This paper explores the contribution that phonetics can make to research into certain types of synaesthesia: those which have speech sounds as the ‘inducer’ or trigger for the synaesthetic experience, and colour as the ‘concurrent’ or triggered experience. These variants are under-researched relative to other variants. We first discuss the complex inter-relationship between speech sounds and graphemes as synaesthetic inducers, then review recent findings concerning the parameters of speech that can evoke impressions of colour. These findings suggest systematic relationships, but a more detailed phonetic approach is needed to better understand the mappings.
Many languages have only one term for “green” and “blue”, generally called “grue”. Since they are especially spoken near the equator, Lindsay and Brown (2002) suggested that “grue” categories are caused by lens-brunescence, resulting from chronic exposure to high amounts of UV radiation. Due to increased lens aging bluish colours should appear greenish. Monitor-simulation experiments supported this hypothesis. However, the distribution of “grue” foci (Regier & Kay 2004) and the adaptation to lens yellowing in older observers (Hardy, Frederick, Kay & Werner 2005) contradicted the lens-brunescence hypothesis.This study reinvestigated the possible influence of aged, brunescent lenses on colour categorization, simulating aged lenses by means of filters. The filter simulation shows important differences to previous monitor simulations, and defuses arguments that were put forward against the lens-brunescence hypothesis.
In our previous study of hue preference for young Chinese and British adults in Newcastle upon Tyne, we found that individual hue preference patterns may be described by the weighted sum of the two universal cone-contrast channels (S-(L+M) and L–M contrast) (Hurlbert & Ling 2007). Therefore, each individual’s hue preference may be reduced to two factors, representing preference along the ‘blue’-‘yellow’ and ‘red’-‘green’ dimensions correspondingly. We also found robust differences between sex and culture, represented by differential weighting on these components. Here we extend the study by investigating colour preference across ages in the U.K. population. A portable experimental box was developed to conduct the study outside the lab. Stimuli were displayed on a calibrated laptop screen fixed at the back of the box. A chin-rest fixed the distance from which observers viewed the stimuli, and their heads were covered by a black curtain to exclude external light from view. The observer had to select, as rapidly as possible, his or her preferred colour from each of a series of pairs of stimuli on a grey background, above and below the centre of the screen. We tested 4 age groups, children (8–9 years old and 11–12 years old), young adults (18–24 years), and elderly adults (61–88 years). The results reveal robust sex and age differences in colour preference for the U.K. population, which are described by our preference model. Implications of these differences are discussed.
Aesthetic response to color is an important aspect of human experience, but little is known about why people like some colors more than others. Previous research suggested explanations based on sensory physiology and color-emotions. In this chapter we propose an ecological valence theory based on the hypothesis that color preferences are caused by people’s average affective responses to color-associated objects. That is, people like colors that are strongly associated with objects they like (e.g. blues with clear skies and clean water) and dislike colors strongly associated with objects they dislike (e.g. browns with feces and rotten fruit). We report data that strongly support this claim: the ecological valence theory not only predicts average color preferences better than three alternative theories containing more free parameters, but it provides a plausible explanation of why color preferences exist and how they arise.
As soon as infants start to perceive the world in colour they express clear preferences for some colours over others. We consider what the purpose of these early colour preferences is by reviewing recent studies that have explored the role of colour preference in colour term acquisition. We show that preference for basic colours mirrors the dichotomous developmental order by which young children acquire basic colour terms. In addition, experimental measures of new colour term learning with non-basic colour terms (e.g. ‘vermillion’) or nonsense words (e.g. ‘cotram’) shows this association is mediated largely by differences in saturation, as both young children and adults prefer highly saturated colours to desaturated colours and they learn to associate novel colour terms to the colours they prefer. Together, these studies provide mounting evidence to suggest that colour preference and colour term acquisition are linked, although the mechanism underpinning this association remains to be determined.
Fehrman and Ferhman (2001), mention that blue is associated with tranquility, security, comfort, depression, melancholy, relaxation, isolation, infinitude and cold. However, these data do not indicate specifications for saturation and lightness of the hue in question. Is it a dark blue of low saturation or a very saturated light blue? Which type of blue actually evokes the stated meanings? Basing itself on such questions, a cross-sectional paper and pencil survey (of nine colors in three different intensities and lightnesses) was conducted with 622 subjects. The results showed different meanings associated with the same hue when there were variations in lightness and saturation. All of the foregoing results indicate the importance of continued research into the attributes that cause a color’s associated meanings to vary. Knowing how (and perhaps why) these meanings vary with saturation and lightness should enable color to be used more effectively in all kinds of design applications.
Whilst there are many anecdotal links between particular colours and particular emotions, there is relatively little in the way of systematic research. In this chapter a protocol is proposed for establishing these links empirically which is then tested on the emotional terms “pleasant”, “unpleasant”, “mood-enhancing” and “calming”. It was found that it is possible to establish reliable colour-emotion associations, at least with culturally homogeneous participants. A framework for understanding these associations is proposed.
An important question in studies on color perception in humans concerns the extent to which lexical items related to colors affect color concepts. In the hope of shedding additional light on this longstanding debate, we propose a computational model of the convergence between visual and linguistic processing paths in the cortex, aimed at exploring the emergence of color concepts in pre-linguistic and linguistic phases of early human development. Three versions of the model, trained with color terms in three different languages, English, Berinmo and Himba, are compared.
Perceptual learning has been shown on a wide variety of achromatic visual tasks. However, very little work has explored the possibility of improvements on chromatically based tasks. Here, we used a transfer of learning paradigm to assess the specificity of improvements at discriminating the orientation of a chromatically defined edge presented in luminance noise. Chromatic thresholds were estimated for two different hues and retinal locations, before and after a ten day training period. During training observers discriminated the orientation of a chromatic edge at just one location and hue. Whilst performance improved following training, these improvements failed to transfer across either retinal location or hue. Our findings suggest that improvements in chromatically-mediated discrimination may involve plasticity at early, retinotopically mapped, stages of visual analysis. Further, they suggest that categorical perception of colour might in part arise from chromatic perceptual learning at colour category boundaries.
What computation does the human brain perform when we experience ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’, or ‘blue’? Where in the visual pathway does the human visual system combine the retinal cone signals (L, M, S) to yield these fundamental colour sensations? Behavioural data show that the four unique hues (red, green, yellow, blue) do not map onto the cone-opponent mechanisms (i.e. L–M; S-(L+M)) found in the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus, a subcortical structure involved in early visual processing. The brain imaging experiment supports the behavioural result: using pattern classification algorithms applied to fMRI brain activation patterns we show that unique hues cannot be classified in the LGN, but we achieve above chance classification in primary visual cortex (V1). Our imaging data provide strong evidence that the unique hues do not originate in subcortical areas, but in the visual cortex, possibly as early as primary visual cortex.
Colour studies attracts an increasingly wide range of scholars from across the academic world. Contributions to the present volume offer a broad perspective on the field, ranging from studies of individual languages through papers on art, architecture and heraldry to psychological examinations of aspects of colour categorization, perception and preference. The chapters have been developed from papers and posters presented at a conference on Progress in Colour Studies (PICS08) held at the University of Glasgow. The volume both updates research reported at the earlier PICS04 conference (published by Benjamins in 2006 as Progress in Colour Studies volumes 1 and 2), and introduces new and exciting topics and developments in colour research. In order to make the articles maximally accessible to a multidisciplinary readership, each of the six sections following the initial theoretical papers begins with a short preface describing and drawing together the themes of the chapters within that section. There are seventeen colour illustrations.
Colour (chromatic) vision not only tells us about the colour of surfaces but about the structure of the visual world. One way that colour vision informs us about scene structure is by helping decompose the scene into its material and illumination layers ability. This is underpinned by the visual system’s in-built knowledge that colour variations, and those luminance variations that are aligned with them, tend to be material in origin, whereas ‘pure’ luminance variations tend to arise from illumination. Evidence for such in-built knowledge is that shadows appear to be material in origin when strongly coloured, and colour variations enhance or suppress perceived shape-from-shading in luminance variations depending on their spatial relationships. These findings remind us that many of the benefits of colour vision only emerge when studying the interactions between colour and luminance rather than colour vision in isolation.
Some trends are well-established across the 110 languages surveyed in the World Color Survey (WCS): colour terms are not distributed arbitrarily through ‘colour space’, and, of all possible combinations of terms within a single language, only a few are encountered. WCS data were analyzed to examine departures from these overall trends. To this end, colour terms were represented as locations in a geometrical ‘colour-naming space’ by calculating the ‘co-extension’ or degree of overlap between each pair of terms and applying multidimensional scaling (MDS) to the resulting pattern of relationships. The three-dimensional MDS solution shows departures from the consensus colour-term boundaries as fine structure in the clustering of points. These departures are not completely random, but show some association with language affiliation within language families. The MDS solution also focuses attention on ‘wildcard’ terms, highlighting the role of such terms as transitional stages in models of colour-lexicon development.
The default opinion in philosophy is that we perceive colours to be intrinsic properties of things, properties that objects have regardless of their relations with perceivers. This intrinsic-intuition is considered a crucial objection to relational theories of colour, ones that account for colours in terms of interactions between perceivers and objects. In this paper I defend relationism by analysing the motivation for the intrinsic-intuition. Firstly, I argue that intuition relies on a historically entrenched, passive model of vision. Secondly, I discuss recent psychophysical work on the connection between colour and perceived material stability. Finally, I develop a relationist phenomenology of colour by making the comparison between colour vision and the active – and interactive – sense of touch.
Semioticians like BCT theory, although there is no semiotic theory of BCTs. In Juri Lotman’s modelling framework, one can analyze the BCTs using the formula “language = code + history” and abandon the technical definition of a BCT (a term is basic if it is frequent and passes some hurdles in experimentation). One can paraphrase Lotman’s formula in the following way: “colour language = BCTs and non-BCTs + history of language and culture”. In this formula, the BCTs form the nucleus of the colour code of a language. A semiotic theory of BCTs can be built up using the formula and numerous dichotomies, i.e. language axes, such as static vs. dynamic, syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic, synchronic vs. diachronic, semasiologic vs. onomasiologic, and logical vs. mythological. These axes organize and model the linguistic colour space (or field of colour).
This study aimed to establish the basic colour terms of Arabic and to clarify the status of three Arabic terms for blue: azrock, samawee and khuhlie. Data from a list task were collected from 253 child and 200 adult native Arabic speakers. The patterns of the terms ordered by their frequency from the two samples were essentially the same. In the colour-naming task, the child and adult samples (N = 61 and 60 respectively) had to name a set of 65 colours representing the whole colour palette. Both samples performed similarly. Based on these results, it appears that Arabic has eleven basic colour terms that correspond to Berlin and Kay’s (1969) universal set. In addition, the terms of particular interest – samawee “light blue” and khuhlie “dark blue” – are not basic Arabic colour terms.
The Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech (SCOTS) is a multimedia corpus of Scottish texts, containing a wide range of written and spoken genres from 1945 to the present day. One application of the resource is the study of the use in context of lexical items. This paper explores ways of exploiting SCOTS to investigate the literal, metaphorical and idiomatic uses of colour terms in contemporary Scots. This involves using the integrated analysis tools to consider the collocational patterning of these terms. Other complementary online resources, such as the Dictionary of the Scots Language, are drawn on where appropriate to aid in the interrogation of the complex body of material in the corpus. The paper also outlines the issues involved in using a minority-language corpus for linguistic research.
... la perception de la couleur n’est pas entièrement elucidée quand on en a precisé les domaines physiques et physiologiques. Il y a une histoire humaine de la perception. [colour perception cannot be fully explained merely by a precise specification of the relevant physical and physiological domains; perception is itself a product of human history.](Ignace Meyerson 1957: 7)The vernacular of the Maltese archipelago displays a twelve-term colour paradigm comprising 〈abjad〉 “white”, 〈iswed〉 “black”, 〈aħmar〉 “red”, 〈aħdar〉 “green”, 〈isfar〉 “yellow”, 〈ċelesti〉 “sky blue”, 〈blu〉 “dark blue”, 〈kannella〉 “brown”, 〈roża〉 “pink”, 〈griż〉 “grey”, 〈oranġjo〉 “orange” and 〈vjola〉 “violet”. The dual systemic split of the blue category is a striking feature of Maltese, inviting comparison with the situation obtaining in Italian and other Mediterranean languages. The hybrid (basically Arabic/Italian) composition of the Maltese colour system presents the linguistic researcher with an intriguing cultural synthesis reached by an erstwhile medieval vernacular of Arabic spoken by a small island community exposed to complex linguistic and cultural currents endemic in its regional and local history. The case of Maltese – a Europeanized Arabic vernacular – highlights the crucial role of external influences on cognitive processes monitoring the acquisition of colour categories, and evokes the need for a linguistic model incorporating an elaborate cultural dimension restricting universalist claims commonly associated with the Berlin and Kay paradigm.
Over the past decades, English has had a strong influence on the German language, including the introduction of new words, among them the colour term pink. A first study (Frenzel 2006) investigated German speakers’ perception of rosa/pink as two separate colours rather than different shades of the same colour. The results suggested that pink was causing a shift in the semantic scope of the German colour term rosa. In order to further investigate this change in progress, a corpus of six popular magazines has been compiled since 2006. To objectively determine the application of the two colour terms and their status in German, instances of pink and rosa were selected on the basis of visual support from illustrative material in the magazines. The interpretation of the corpus takes semantic, connotative, contextual, and, particularly, stylistic considerations into account to ascertain the level of basicness of pink in the German language.
The aim of this paper is to present the colour lexicon, including both basic and non-basic terms, found in Kashubian (or Cassubian), a West Slavic language spoken by a relatively small community inhabiting the coast of the Baltic Sea (the Pomorskie Province in Poland). The results of the five-minute elicitation list task show that Kashubian basic colour terms include words for white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, grey and pink. As regards the terms for purple and orange, due to language contact (Kashubian people are bilingual), many informants use the Polish words naming these colours; however, these words may – as the results of the task indicate – be treated as non-basic terms. Besides, it is worth considering whether Kashubian, like Russian and Ukrainian, has evolved a second basic term for blue.
Russian attributive constructions with colour terms are analyzed using the Russian National Corpus. We focus on recently emerging colour terms and their development through to the early twenty-first century. Terms are considered in a construction-based framework, as syntactic-semantic rule pairs, with the emphasis on dynamics in their taxonomic combinability. This is exemplified by constructions denoting the brown category: names for objects, having similar referential meaning, collocate exclusively with one of the contending colour terms, buryj (older) or koričnevyj (newer). We argue that constraints on the usage of a colour term reflect a taxonomic boundary between two classes: the older term applies to natural objects whereas its new rival initially applies to artefacts, later expanding to natural objects. This finding indicates that discourse functioning of emerging colour terms is driven by the cognitive concept of ‘naturalness’. Combinability with nouns from both taxonomic classes is suggested as a supplementary linguistic criterion of colour term basicness.
This paper describes and discusses list and naming experiments designed to ascertain whether Turkish lacivert “dark blue” is a Basic Colour Term (BCT). In addition to the standard sixty-five Color-aid tiles selected by Davies and Corbett (1995), seventeen additional tiles from the purple-blue region of colour space were used for these tasks. Measured against Urmas Sutrop’s cognitive salience index (Sutrop 2001), lacivert attained high salience in the list task. However, the combined results suggest eleven Turkish BCTs (excluding lacivert): yeşil “green”, sarı “yellow”, siyah “black”, kırmızı “red”, mavi “blue”, beyaz “white”, mor “purple”, kahverengi “brown”, pembe “pink”, turuncu “orange” and gri “grey”. Lacivert remains a BCT candidate due to the additional tile used in the naming task, which emerged as dominant.
In 1969 Brent Berlin and Paul Kay suggested that Hungarian may constitute an exception to their theory of universal BCCs by possessing 12 BCTs, including two basic reds. Recently some researchers have proposed that this is also true for Czech. These two genetically distant Central European languages were tested in large empirical-cognitive field studies in 2002, 2003 and 2007. The data collected show that both languages possess exactly 11 BCTs, including one basic term for red. However, it seems that the other term for red is culturally salient on a non-basic level. The puzzle of two salient terms for red could be best understood by drawing attention to the contextual impact on meaning, which is handled by examining syntagmatic and paradigmatic collocations. The case of the two colour terms may represent a unique areal phenomenon.
The hundred most common surnames in Scotland include seven colour terms. Surnames developed from bynames, as extra names given to individuals to distinguish them from others of the same name. Bynames are still in use within some communities, including in some areas of Scotland. By investigating how colours are used in bynaming in a present-day community and comparing this diachronically with the colour bynames from which some surnames originated, it is possible to gain an insight into how people use colours in naming more generally. Interviews were used to investigate bynames synchronically in a close-knit community in the Western Isles of Scotland. This is a bilingual community where both Scottish Gaelic and English are spoken. Gaining examples from interviews, rather than written records, allows for a firmer understanding of why these names were bestowed. This can contribute towards explaining why and how colours were assigned to people in the past.
This chapter examines the use of colour in Francis Bacon’s paintings, focusing particularly on Head VI (1949) and the neglected Triptych (1977). The chapter will demonstrate how Julia Kristeva’s ideas about colour and language, developed in the context of Early Renaissance art, are equally applicable to Bacon’s paintings. They provide a valuable explanation for the artist’s rich palette and his often unusual techniques. Kristeva’s ideas also reveal how Bacon’s chromatics can be understood to trigger memories of the early stages of psychic life. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Bacon’s approach to colour should be understood as contributing to the expression of a sexuality for which no pre-existing visual rhetoric was available.
Making distinctions between colour and colour appearance is essential in exploring the chromatic qualities applied to and in urban and architectural space. As a chromatic landscape, the atmosphere of any urban space is a process of the ongoing construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of ‘colour appearance/shadow’ which is performed through and upon buildings, volumes, spaces, voids, vegetation, and networks of various systems of activities and events, including those of the city’s inhabitants. Considering the diversity of colour appearances and their ephemeral, semi-permanent and permanent aspects, chromatic studies of any particular context need to be built upon aspects of the geographical environment as well as upon issues related to the cultural context and the social memory. Dealing with various environmental concerns in combination with diverse ways of life and cultures requires both openness and a focused approach. In our contemporary age of globalization, addressing culturally and contextually determined chromatic concerns is especially challenging.
This article builds on work previously published (Huxtable 2006: 199–217) to explore three key aspects of the interpretation of armorial colours as written in texts of different genres from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. These key aspects are: (1) the use of a didactic theological discourse that had emerged in the late eleventh century and was concerned with the ‘spiritual’ nature of knighthood (viewing it as a military wing of the priesthood); (2) the use of ideas gleaned from the period’s natural philosophy, concerned with the nature of colour as material (that is, derived from the elemental qualities of bodies); and (3) the use of a creative mode in which complex symbolic and allegorical models of identity could be composed.
Conceptual color metaphor/metonym (CCMM) and our semantic frame of color are motivated through the embodied co-occurrence of color experience as light (RGBu) and as pigment/substance (RYBu [CYM where C= cyan M = Magenta]). Conceptual perceptive mapping establishes a cognitive mechanism to accommodate the positive and negative connotations in relation to both conventional and non-conventional color items. Fifty participants assessed 143 items in four color tasks, involving the eleven universal basic color concepts. The items were divided between the visual and the linguistic aspects: color metaphor and color metonym. This paper investigates the results in the strictly hue dimension in comparison with the conceptualization of temperature warm/cool and brightness light/dark. Furthermore, the presence of a linguistic and a visual ‘afterimage’ effect is analyzed. CCMM theory helps explain how individuals conceptualize and categorize opponent polysemic association functions in the parallel signal/symbol cognitive processing of color and color language.
In this paper I analyze and discuss the effects of the use of specific colour vocabulary employed by five English-speaking travelogue writers visiting northern Scandinavia in the nineteenth century. The number of different colour terms (types) and their frequency of occurrence (tokens) as well as the objects they describe are presented and analyzed. The results show that the objects described most often with specific colour vocabulary are natural objects in the landscape. I argue that this use of colour precision in the discourse can be viewed as reflecting two aspects: first, a desire to add attributes such as exoticness and exclusiveness to the narrative as they are readily available associations in many terms; second, the writers’ engagement and involvement in the landscape they travel through, as the use of specific terminology can be very clearly linked to the writers’ opinions about what is described.
Categorical perception (CP) of colour is demonstrated by faster and more accurate discrimination of colours that cross a category boundary than equivalently spaced colours from the same colour category. Despite a plethora of behavioural research investigating the origin and nature of colour CP, the underlying mechanisms involved in the effect are still unresolved. A recent body of work has made use of the Event-Related Potential (ERP) technique, which involves the measurement of event-related brain potentials at the scalp, enabling exploration of the time course of neural processes that are involved in colour CP. The merits of the ERP technique are presented and five studies that have used this approach to investigate colour CP and colour categorization are reviewed. Each is discussed in relation to the debate about the origin and nature of colour category effects.
There is indirect evidence that categorical colour perception (better discrimination of colours from different categories than those from the same category). For instance, CP can be induced across a newly learned category boundary (Özgen & Davies 2002). Here we replicate and extend Özgen and Davies’s category learning study to try and pinpoint the nature of the changes underlying category learning. Participants learned to divide green into two new categories ‘yellow-green’/‘blue-green’ across four days. The trained group showed CP across the new boundary on a target detection task and this was restricted to the left hemisphere (LH; cf. Drivonikou et al. 2007), whereas the controls did not. The results could suggest that category training produces changes at early stages in visual processing mainly in the LH.
This chapter reports three experiments detailing the influences of stimulus range on color categorization. The results show that both categorization and speed of categorization of colorful stimuli can be influenced by stimulus range. Two potential consequences are considered. First, the influences of stimulus range on color categorization can help explain inconsistencies in the color literature relating to the reliability of color categorization. Second, the same influences appear relevant to the interpretation of experiments investigating color categorical perception.
There is converging evidence for atypical perception in those with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This chapter reviews a series of studies that have initiated the investigation of colour perception in ASD. Research is reviewed that identifies effects of colour on reading speed, visual discrimination and atypical behaviour in ASD. We also reviewed research that suggests that encoding of colour is atypical in those with ASD, and studies that provide evidence for reduced chromatic discrimination in those with the disorder. The theoretical and practical implications of investigations of colour perception in ASD are highlighted. Avenues for further research are suggested that could clarify how those with ASD process and experience the world of colour.
We describe Red-Green dichromats’ use of basic colour terms and compare this with naming errors predicted by metameric equivalence derived from confusion lines in CIE (International Commission on Illumination) coordinates. After briefly reviewing previous work, the results from two tasks – prototype selection and colour term mapping – are presented. Dichromats’ choice of prototype was surprisingly similar to that of typical observers, especially for primary BCTs. More errors were made in the mapping task by including stimuli that were similar in transformed lightness and that shared a confusion line with stimuli that typical observers included in the range of the given term. Additionally, evidence was obtained that use of BCTs was dependent on residual R–G (red-green) mechanism activity.
Synaesthesia is an inherited condition that can give rise to a ‘merging of the senses’. People with synaesthesia experience unusual perceptions (e.g. colours, tastes) when engaged in everyday activities like reading, speaking, listening to music, and so on. Synaesthetic perceptions of colour can be triggered by a range of stimuli, including sounds, tastes, smells, touches, and even linguistic stimuli such as letters, numbers and words. In this paper, I describe work on colour synaesthesia from the Synaesthesia and Sensory Integration Lab at Edinburgh University, where we examine the cognitive, linguistic, and developmental basis of this unusual condition. These data contribute to the emerging view that synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes lie on a continuum of cross-sensory association, but one where neuro-developmental differences allow synaesthetes to experience these colour associations at a conscious level.
This paper explores the contribution that phonetics can make to research into certain types of synaesthesia: those which have speech sounds as the ‘inducer’ or trigger for the synaesthetic experience, and colour as the ‘concurrent’ or triggered experience. These variants are under-researched relative to other variants. We first discuss the complex inter-relationship between speech sounds and graphemes as synaesthetic inducers, then review recent findings concerning the parameters of speech that can evoke impressions of colour. These findings suggest systematic relationships, but a more detailed phonetic approach is needed to better understand the mappings.
Many languages have only one term for “green” and “blue”, generally called “grue”. Since they are especially spoken near the equator, Lindsay and Brown (2002) suggested that “grue” categories are caused by lens-brunescence, resulting from chronic exposure to high amounts of UV radiation. Due to increased lens aging bluish colours should appear greenish. Monitor-simulation experiments supported this hypothesis. However, the distribution of “grue” foci (Regier & Kay 2004) and the adaptation to lens yellowing in older observers (Hardy, Frederick, Kay & Werner 2005) contradicted the lens-brunescence hypothesis.This study reinvestigated the possible influence of aged, brunescent lenses on colour categorization, simulating aged lenses by means of filters. The filter simulation shows important differences to previous monitor simulations, and defuses arguments that were put forward against the lens-brunescence hypothesis.
In our previous study of hue preference for young Chinese and British adults in Newcastle upon Tyne, we found that individual hue preference patterns may be described by the weighted sum of the two universal cone-contrast channels (S-(L+M) and L–M contrast) (Hurlbert & Ling 2007). Therefore, each individual’s hue preference may be reduced to two factors, representing preference along the ‘blue’-‘yellow’ and ‘red’-‘green’ dimensions correspondingly. We also found robust differences between sex and culture, represented by differential weighting on these components. Here we extend the study by investigating colour preference across ages in the U.K. population. A portable experimental box was developed to conduct the study outside the lab. Stimuli were displayed on a calibrated laptop screen fixed at the back of the box. A chin-rest fixed the distance from which observers viewed the stimuli, and their heads were covered by a black curtain to exclude external light from view. The observer had to select, as rapidly as possible, his or her preferred colour from each of a series of pairs of stimuli on a grey background, above and below the centre of the screen. We tested 4 age groups, children (8–9 years old and 11–12 years old), young adults (18–24 years), and elderly adults (61–88 years). The results reveal robust sex and age differences in colour preference for the U.K. population, which are described by our preference model. Implications of these differences are discussed.
Aesthetic response to color is an important aspect of human experience, but little is known about why people like some colors more than others. Previous research suggested explanations based on sensory physiology and color-emotions. In this chapter we propose an ecological valence theory based on the hypothesis that color preferences are caused by people’s average affective responses to color-associated objects. That is, people like colors that are strongly associated with objects they like (e.g. blues with clear skies and clean water) and dislike colors strongly associated with objects they dislike (e.g. browns with feces and rotten fruit). We report data that strongly support this claim: the ecological valence theory not only predicts average color preferences better than three alternative theories containing more free parameters, but it provides a plausible explanation of why color preferences exist and how they arise.
As soon as infants start to perceive the world in colour they express clear preferences for some colours over others. We consider what the purpose of these early colour preferences is by reviewing recent studies that have explored the role of colour preference in colour term acquisition. We show that preference for basic colours mirrors the dichotomous developmental order by which young children acquire basic colour terms. In addition, experimental measures of new colour term learning with non-basic colour terms (e.g. ‘vermillion’) or nonsense words (e.g. ‘cotram’) shows this association is mediated largely by differences in saturation, as both young children and adults prefer highly saturated colours to desaturated colours and they learn to associate novel colour terms to the colours they prefer. Together, these studies provide mounting evidence to suggest that colour preference and colour term acquisition are linked, although the mechanism underpinning this association remains to be determined.
Fehrman and Ferhman (2001), mention that blue is associated with tranquility, security, comfort, depression, melancholy, relaxation, isolation, infinitude and cold. However, these data do not indicate specifications for saturation and lightness of the hue in question. Is it a dark blue of low saturation or a very saturated light blue? Which type of blue actually evokes the stated meanings? Basing itself on such questions, a cross-sectional paper and pencil survey (of nine colors in three different intensities and lightnesses) was conducted with 622 subjects. The results showed different meanings associated with the same hue when there were variations in lightness and saturation. All of the foregoing results indicate the importance of continued research into the attributes that cause a color’s associated meanings to vary. Knowing how (and perhaps why) these meanings vary with saturation and lightness should enable color to be used more effectively in all kinds of design applications.
Whilst there are many anecdotal links between particular colours and particular emotions, there is relatively little in the way of systematic research. In this chapter a protocol is proposed for establishing these links empirically which is then tested on the emotional terms “pleasant”, “unpleasant”, “mood-enhancing” and “calming”. It was found that it is possible to establish reliable colour-emotion associations, at least with culturally homogeneous participants. A framework for understanding these associations is proposed.
An important question in studies on color perception in humans concerns the extent to which lexical items related to colors affect color concepts. In the hope of shedding additional light on this longstanding debate, we propose a computational model of the convergence between visual and linguistic processing paths in the cortex, aimed at exploring the emergence of color concepts in pre-linguistic and linguistic phases of early human development. Three versions of the model, trained with color terms in three different languages, English, Berinmo and Himba, are compared.
Perceptual learning has been shown on a wide variety of achromatic visual tasks. However, very little work has explored the possibility of improvements on chromatically based tasks. Here, we used a transfer of learning paradigm to assess the specificity of improvements at discriminating the orientation of a chromatically defined edge presented in luminance noise. Chromatic thresholds were estimated for two different hues and retinal locations, before and after a ten day training period. During training observers discriminated the orientation of a chromatic edge at just one location and hue. Whilst performance improved following training, these improvements failed to transfer across either retinal location or hue. Our findings suggest that improvements in chromatically-mediated discrimination may involve plasticity at early, retinotopically mapped, stages of visual analysis. Further, they suggest that categorical perception of colour might in part arise from chromatic perceptual learning at colour category boundaries.
What computation does the human brain perform when we experience ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’, or ‘blue’? Where in the visual pathway does the human visual system combine the retinal cone signals (L, M, S) to yield these fundamental colour sensations? Behavioural data show that the four unique hues (red, green, yellow, blue) do not map onto the cone-opponent mechanisms (i.e. L–M; S-(L+M)) found in the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus, a subcortical structure involved in early visual processing. The brain imaging experiment supports the behavioural result: using pattern classification algorithms applied to fMRI brain activation patterns we show that unique hues cannot be classified in the LGN, but we achieve above chance classification in primary visual cortex (V1). Our imaging data provide strong evidence that the unique hues do not originate in subcortical areas, but in the visual cortex, possibly as early as primary visual cortex.