This is not a particularly new finding. Other studies in the past have shown the same results with this exact same task, albeit with different languages that make the same distinction (or lack...
This is not a particularly new finding. Other studies in the past have shown the same results with this exact same task, albeit with different languages that make the same distinction (or lack thereof). It's pretty well-known in linguistics that there are statistically significant (but minute in terms of absolute time) differences in time for this type of task based on how your native language divides color vocabulary.
EDIT TO ADD: The difference in this study from other previous well-known studies (that I didn't notice when I initially commented bc I only skimmed) is that it also notes a difference based on which languages bilingual subjects are using during the task, as opposed to just checking with monolinguals with different native languages. Which is interesting, but not super shocking given the earlier studies.
The claim that this evidences a difference in how we perceive color is too strong for results like this, imo. It's a possible hypothesis but it would require additional evidence to distinguish it from alternative hypotheses that are also compatible with the findings in this study (and others like it).
I find this fascinating as a professional seamstress, and also my husband did custom color work painting bicycles. What is 'blue' to an individual? When I would try to get people to nail down a...
I find this fascinating as a professional seamstress, and also my husband did custom color work painting bicycles. What is 'blue' to an individual?
When I would try to get people to nail down a color choice (let's use red as an example), I'd often have to play 20 questions or have samples at the ready. I'm sure artists and other creatives can relate to that experience. So does this client want what I term 'true red', or maybe chili pepper red, dark red, do they want something leaning toward brown like a brick red or toward black like a maroon.
The article talked about light blue and dark blue, but in my world, there are so many blues; tone and tint play a part, as do variations like indigo, cyan, cobalt. When I say these words, I can 'see' certain colors. Again with red; geranium, cerise or ruby, variations that all are 'red', but then not really. BTW, I am not talking about the naming that home paint companies often use to name commercial colors, like grape explosion, or zen retreat. I guess my point is we all know the colors of the rainbow, but once you get outside of that and really start to drill down into the nuances, it can actually get much more difficult to communicate meaning and preference.
Maybe other creative or artists can comment on this and if they have found that communicating color can be difficult when trying to work with clients. What strategies did you use?
Language, culture, and geography are highly correlated. The example the article used was that Russian has two words for blue, one for light blue and one for dark blue, while English only has one....
Language, culture, and geography are highly correlated. The example the article used was that Russian has two words for blue, one for light blue and one for dark blue, while English only has one. In a study, Russian speakers are better at distinguishing blues.
It may also be that it is more important to be able to distinguish between light and dark blue in Russia's geography - and that's both why Russians are better able to distinguish blues AND why the language has two words.
One explanation is that there's very little difference in the perception of color but that sorting color into categories is a task that's very cognitively similar to what your brain does when...
One explanation is that there's very little difference in the perception of color but that sorting color into categories is a task that's very cognitively similar to what your brain does when deciding which word to use to describe a color, and thus that you're more practiced at that similar task when your native language distinguishes two colors.
I may be misunderstanding, but I thought that was the hypothesis. I don’t think anyone is claiming that people whose native languages group colors differently aren’t actually seeing the same thing.
I may be misunderstanding, but I thought that was the hypothesis. I don’t think anyone is claiming that people whose native languages group colors differently aren’t actually seeing the same thing.
The word "perception" is fuzzy enough that it's hard to tell for sure. I think the people writing news articles about the research are to blame for this; I'm sure in the actual paper the authors...
The word "perception" is fuzzy enough that it's hard to tell for sure. I think the people writing news articles about the research are to blame for this; I'm sure in the actual paper the authors word things in a clearer way.
There actually have been claims made that aren't far off from "people's native language mean they can/cannot perceive any difference between two colors", and though that more intense version has been pretty thoroughly debunked and aren't taken super seriously in academic circles, they pop up a lot in pop sci. So anything adjacent to that gets an extra dose of skepticism. I still get annoyed whenever I see a certain tumblr post talking about how Homer refers to the "wine-dark sea" because the ancient Greeks literally couldn't see blue.
I think the title is less specific than the subject of the study about which the article seems to be written: But I’m still not sure this is novel.
I think the title is less specific than the subject of the study about which the article seems to be written:
“Our study revealed that the bilingual participants’ ability to distinguish between shades of colour was influenced by the language they used while performing the task. These findings shed light on the dynamic interaction between language and perception, i.e. our perception of sensory input,” says Mila Vulchanova.
It's definitely markedly more interesting than the actual title! It's a shame that it's difficult to summarize into a title, because that is - at least to me, a layman relatively speaking when it...
It's definitely markedly more interesting than the actual title! It's a shame that it's difficult to summarize into a title, because that is - at least to me, a layman relatively speaking when it comes to linguistics - very fascinating!
To me this makes perfect sense. If you know you have 20 words to choose from to name colours in a certain language, you'll be dividing it into those 20 different shades. You'll only switch from...
To me this makes perfect sense. If you know you have 20 words to choose from to name colours in a certain language, you'll be dividing it into those 20 different shades. You'll only switch from one to the next colour name once the colour has changed sufficiently from one named shade to the next.
If you're using a language with 50 different words to choose from, you will naturally have to "wait" a lot less before being able to call one shade sufficiently different from another to be call it by another name. To me this seems so obvious, yet I can't explain how it works and why we are all so similar.
The more granular the words you have to choose from, the more granular you can be with those words.
We are efficient creatures. Keeping an active log of the billions of datapoints of input we get through our senses every day is just not something doable for any creature, ever. So we filter. For us humans, language is one of these massive filtering systems.
Exactly how that works is both fascinating to me, and also at the same time seems so simple. We only keep the information we can parse through our filters. We can't keep and recreate the actual input, so we use these other systems, like language.
If we could output light of the same frequency for others to the also experience in its raw form, for example, there wouldn't be a need for all these other roundabout ways of approximating the experience of it.
For sensation, we can output onto others through using the same kind of stimuli that was used on us to begin with. While we don't know if it will be experienced exactly the same, we still retain a catalogue of how that stimulation was produced (say, feather against skin), and all of that information is then retained. Both the visuals of the items, the place on the body it was used, the manner in which it moved against the skin, words to describe that, but also the physicality of it that we can then reproduce without the use of language.
I think we use the tools we have for future reproduction, and since we can't just beam light from our body, we fall back on language. We also use sensation approximations for colours like warm, cold etc. We don't store the actual true input. Only the ways in which we can reproduce the experience to share it with ourselves and others, is my thought.
What facinates me even more is that someone that is more able to reproduce colours (or sound, movement, what have you) through physical implementation might also pull on a wider variety of words, even if they could also just use paint (or instruments, or their movements etc) to just show what they mean. At least in my experience.
This is not a particularly new finding. Other studies in the past have shown the same results with this exact same task, albeit with different languages that make the same distinction (or lack thereof). It's pretty well-known in linguistics that there are statistically significant (but minute in terms of absolute time) differences in time for this type of task based on how your native language divides color vocabulary.
EDIT TO ADD: The difference in this study from other previous well-known studies (that I didn't notice when I initially commented bc I only skimmed) is that it also notes a difference based on which languages bilingual subjects are using during the task, as opposed to just checking with monolinguals with different native languages. Which is interesting, but not super shocking given the earlier studies.
The claim that this evidences a difference in how we perceive color is too strong for results like this, imo. It's a possible hypothesis but it would require additional evidence to distinguish it from alternative hypotheses that are also compatible with the findings in this study (and others like it).
I find this fascinating as a professional seamstress, and also my husband did custom color work painting bicycles. What is 'blue' to an individual?
When I would try to get people to nail down a color choice (let's use red as an example), I'd often have to play 20 questions or have samples at the ready. I'm sure artists and other creatives can relate to that experience. So does this client want what I term 'true red', or maybe chili pepper red, dark red, do they want something leaning toward brown like a brick red or toward black like a maroon.
The article talked about light blue and dark blue, but in my world, there are so many blues; tone and tint play a part, as do variations like indigo, cyan, cobalt. When I say these words, I can 'see' certain colors. Again with red; geranium, cerise or ruby, variations that all are 'red', but then not really. BTW, I am not talking about the naming that home paint companies often use to name commercial colors, like grape explosion, or zen retreat. I guess my point is we all know the colors of the rainbow, but once you get outside of that and really start to drill down into the nuances, it can actually get much more difficult to communicate meaning and preference.
Maybe other creative or artists can comment on this and if they have found that communicating color can be difficult when trying to work with clients. What strategies did you use?
What are the other hypotheses that are compatible with the study’s findings?
Language, culture, and geography are highly correlated. The example the article used was that Russian has two words for blue, one for light blue and one for dark blue, while English only has one. In a study, Russian speakers are better at distinguishing blues.
It may also be that it is more important to be able to distinguish between light and dark blue in Russia's geography - and that's both why Russians are better able to distinguish blues AND why the language has two words.
One explanation is that there's very little difference in the perception of color but that sorting color into categories is a task that's very cognitively similar to what your brain does when deciding which word to use to describe a color, and thus that you're more practiced at that similar task when your native language distinguishes two colors.
I may be misunderstanding, but I thought that was the hypothesis. I don’t think anyone is claiming that people whose native languages group colors differently aren’t actually seeing the same thing.
The word "perception" is fuzzy enough that it's hard to tell for sure. I think the people writing news articles about the research are to blame for this; I'm sure in the actual paper the authors word things in a clearer way.
There actually have been claims made that aren't far off from "people's native language mean they can/cannot perceive any difference between two colors", and though that more intense version has been pretty thoroughly debunked and aren't taken super seriously in academic circles, they pop up a lot in pop sci. So anything adjacent to that gets an extra dose of skepticism. I still get annoyed whenever I see a certain tumblr post talking about how Homer refers to the "wine-dark sea" because the ancient Greeks literally couldn't see blue.
I think the title is less specific than the subject of the study about which the article seems to be written:
But I’m still not sure this is novel.
It's definitely markedly more interesting than the actual title! It's a shame that it's difficult to summarize into a title, because that is - at least to me, a layman relatively speaking when it comes to linguistics - very fascinating!
To me this makes perfect sense. If you know you have 20 words to choose from to name colours in a certain language, you'll be dividing it into those 20 different shades. You'll only switch from one to the next colour name once the colour has changed sufficiently from one named shade to the next.
If you're using a language with 50 different words to choose from, you will naturally have to "wait" a lot less before being able to call one shade sufficiently different from another to be call it by another name. To me this seems so obvious, yet I can't explain how it works and why we are all so similar.
The more granular the words you have to choose from, the more granular you can be with those words.
We are efficient creatures. Keeping an active log of the billions of datapoints of input we get through our senses every day is just not something doable for any creature, ever. So we filter. For us humans, language is one of these massive filtering systems.
Exactly how that works is both fascinating to me, and also at the same time seems so simple. We only keep the information we can parse through our filters. We can't keep and recreate the actual input, so we use these other systems, like language.
If we could output light of the same frequency for others to the also experience in its raw form, for example, there wouldn't be a need for all these other roundabout ways of approximating the experience of it.
For sensation, we can output onto others through using the same kind of stimuli that was used on us to begin with. While we don't know if it will be experienced exactly the same, we still retain a catalogue of how that stimulation was produced (say, feather against skin), and all of that information is then retained. Both the visuals of the items, the place on the body it was used, the manner in which it moved against the skin, words to describe that, but also the physicality of it that we can then reproduce without the use of language.
I think we use the tools we have for future reproduction, and since we can't just beam light from our body, we fall back on language. We also use sensation approximations for colours like warm, cold etc. We don't store the actual true input. Only the ways in which we can reproduce the experience to share it with ourselves and others, is my thought.
What facinates me even more is that someone that is more able to reproduce colours (or sound, movement, what have you) through physical implementation might also pull on a wider variety of words, even if they could also just use paint (or instruments, or their movements etc) to just show what they mean. At least in my experience.