Multilingual/Bilingual Color Naming/Categories

Abstract

Definition A bilingual person is a person fluent in more than one language, either from birth or acquired later in life. A multilingual person is fluent in more than two languages. Color naming is the process of assigning color terms to refer to color appearances in the world. Color categories are mental representations of the regions of color space that are designated by particular color terms or names. Empirical Comparisons The influence of culture on color perception and categorization is most often studied by comparing the use of single-word (monolexemic) color terms to name color categories across different languages, as in the World Color Survey [1, 2]. Color categorization and naming have been studied across a wide range of cultures to explore questions about the universality of basic color categories, relativism of color naming and/or perception, and the ways in which color perception contribute to color naming. However, such comparisons between groups of individuals speaking different languages in different cultures necessarily confound differences in individual experience and individual perception with the linguistic properties of the languages spoken and the categorization practices of the cultures themselves, resulting in a difficulty identifying the distinct contribution of each source of influence on color-naming behavior. Comparison of the categorization and naming behavior of multilingual or bilingual individuals using each of their distinct languages provides a way of controlling for individual differences so that the influence of culture and linguistics on naming can be more readily observed. Comparisons of multilingual/bilingual individuals performing identical color-naming or observation tasks separately in each of their languages depend on the level of fluency of the individual in each language. In some cases, a person may know two or more languages because he or she is an immigrant to a new culture, in the process of acquiring a new language while using the native language or previously acquired languages less frequently. In other cases, a person is a participant in a multicultural society in which different languages are spoken in different contexts and for different purposes but are generally spoken frequently enough to be refreshed in memory. The sequence in which languages were acquired and the relative proficiency in each language are important and should be measured in studies of multilingual or bilingual color naming. An individual in the process of assimilation to a new culture and language may experience interference from previous languages. He or she may be motivated to forget or experience pressure to forget previously acquired languages, affecting naming behavior. Studies comparing bilingual naming to monolingual naming show increased consensus of response among bilinguals, as well as a preference for use of more basic terms, perhaps reflecting a focus on what is shared across languages or perhaps a vocabulary loss affecting the less frequently used, more differentiated terms needed to describe subtleties of color *