Abstract
AbstractRussian color naming was explored in a web‐based experiment. The purpose was 3‐fold: to examine (1) CIELAB coordinates of centroids for 12 Russian basic color terms (BCTs), including 2 Russian terms for “blue”, sinij “dark blue”, and goluboj “light blue”, and compare these with coordinates for the 11 English BCTs obtained in earlier studies; (2) frequent nonBCTs; and (3) gender differences in color naming. Native Russian speakers participated in the experiment using an unconstrained color‐naming method. Each participant named 20 colors, selected from 600 colors densely sampling the Munsell Color Solid. Color names and response times of typing onset were registered. Several deviations between centroids of the Russian and English BCTs were found. The 2 “Russian blues”, as expected, divided the BLUE area along the lightness dimension; their centroids deviated from a centroid of English blue. Further minor departures were found between centroids of Russian and English counterparts of “brown” and “red”. The Russian color inventory confirmed the linguistic refinement of the PURPLE area, with high frequencies of nonBCTs. In addition, Russian speakers revealed elaborated naming strategies and use of a rich inventory of nonBCTs. Elicitation frequencies of the 12 BCTs were comparable for both genders; however, linguistic segmentation of color space, employing a synthetic observer, revealed gender differences in naming colors, with more refined naming of the “warm” colors from females. We conclude that, along with universal perceptual factors, that govern categorical partition of color space, Russian speakers’ color naming reflects language‐specific factors, supporting the weak relativity hypothesis.
Highlights
In this study we investigate color naming of Russian speakers using data obtained from a web-based experiment employing an unconstrained color-naming method and a representative Munsell color sample
In the following analysis we focused on 3 aspects: (1) centroids for 12 Russian basic color terms (BCTs) compared with those for 11 English BCTs; (2) frequent Russian nonBCTs; (3) gender differences in Russian-speaking respondents
We compared location of centroids for 12 Russian BCTs estimated in this study with the centroids for 11 English BCTs obtained under controlled laboratory conditions[53] and in a web-based experiment,[38] the latter having employed the present set of color stimuli and design
Summary
Others.[1,2,3] The aim of this study was to explore Russian speakers’ color term inventory, color-naming strategies and According to its color, a visual stimulus is assigned to a cer- linguistic segmentation of color space; an auxiliary aim was tain color category. Berlin and Kay’s5 seminal work introduced the concept of universal basic color terms (BCTs) According to their hypothesis: (1) languages can contain up to 11 BCTs named in English black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, orange, pink, and gray; (2) across languages, basic color categories (BCCs) tend to cluster around certain privileged points in perceptual color space—category best examples, or focal colors; (3) BCTs consistently appear in a given language’s color lexicon in a constrained order. |3 brown’) is used.[27] A recent exception is koričnevyj saxar “brown sugar”, food item that entered the Russian market more than 10 years ago: the imported status of this natural product probably invited koričnevyj, a BCT, as translation of the English brown. In addition to analysis of the whole dataset, we examine differences in color naming between females and males
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