A Cross‐Cultural Study of Color‐Grouping: Tests of the Perceptual‐Physiology Account of Color Universals

Abstract

Kay and McDaniel (1978) proposed that Berlin and Kay's (1969) linguistic color universals were based on universal perceptual physiology. If this is so then speakers of languages with relatively few basic color terms should have perceptual structures corresponding to the "missing" linguistic categories—the nascent categories hypothesis. Further, speakers of languages with the full set of terms for the 11 universal categories should still retain the perceptual structure that yields the evolutionary path embodied on the hierarchy—the recapitulation hypothesis. This article tests these complementary hypotheses by comparing speakers of English, Russian, and Setswana— languages that have 11, 12, and 5 basic color terms respectively —using a color‐grouping task. The fit to the latest version of the theory (Kay et al. 1991) was closer than to earlier versions of the theory, but even so there were still discrepancies. Thus there is support for the universalist's position (there are strong similarities across languages in color grouping despite linguistic differences), but Berlin and Kay's framework may not encapsulate the full extent of color‐category universalism.