Week 1 - Language, colour, and awareness Flashcards
What is a limitation of investigating the effect of language on colour discrimination by studying colour memory only?
perceptual discriminations among stimuli that can all be viewed at the same time might be more influenced by subjective similarity than language itself
What was the main finding of Winawer et al. (2007) who compared colour perception in English and Russian?
when the language itself makes categorical distinctions, it results in language-specific categorical distortions in objective perceptual tasks
Both Russian- and English-speakers can discriminate between goluboy (light blue) and siniy (dark blue). What makes the two languages different?
Russian speakers cannot avoid distinguishing the colours, they must do so to speak Russian in a conventional manner.
How do Russian speakers have a category advantage over English speakers in discriminating shades of blue?
Russian speakers discriminate between blues better, but only for more difficult discriminations. Additionally, they are not influenced by spatial interference, but are at a disadvantage from verbal interference
How do Winawer et al. (2007) propose that language-specific distortions in perceptual performance arise?
As a function of the interaction of lower-level perceptual processing and higher-level knowledge systems (e.g., language)
What was the main finding in the study of 110 languages by Gibson et al. (2017)?
that despite gross differences across languages, communication of colours is always better for warm (yellows/reds) than cool colours (blues/greens)
The two most prominent ideas are that colour categories are either ____ or ____ .
universal, shaped by culture
How might the use of colour terms depend on communicative needs?
Objects are typically warm-coloured and backgrounds tend to be cool-coloured, making different colours more or less perceptually salient in different cultures depending on their needs (e.g. industrialisation)
What was the main conclusion by Gibson et al. (2017) based on their finding?
All languages have a comprehensible colour lexicon among their population, all of which prioritise the communication of warm colours
What determines the universal patterns across diverse languages?
the consistent link between warm colours and behaviourally relevant salient objects in the environment
What did Gibson et al. (2017) determine was the reason that languages have names for colours?
because it’s useful
What does the efficient-communication hypothesis state (Gibson et al., 2017)?
that categories reflect a tradeoff between informativeness of the terms and their number
What is the modularity thesis (Lupyan et al., 2013)?
language and vision are independent modules, where processes in one domain do not influence processes in the other
there are many demonstrations of this thesis being incorrect
What is depicted in the following graph?
Note: Communication efficiency = surprisal (i.e., communication inefficiency)
a. Tsimane are less efficient in colour communication than the Spanish and English speakers
b. regardless of inter-language differences, communication of warm colours is better than for cool colours
