New insights into the evolution of color terms or an effect of saturation?

Abstract

Through their thorough investigation of the Hadza, a nonindustrialized language community in Tanzania, Lindsey and colleagues (2015) developed a new approach to understand the evolution of color terms. In the present commentary, I discuss the possibility that some of their results might be explained by the lacking control of saturation of their color stimuli. The saturation of colors plays an important yet widely neglected role in color naming. The additional analyses presented here suggest that the results on Hadzane color naming could be due to variations in saturation in the stimulus set rather than being evidence for universal constraints on color term evolution.