Color Concepts and Their Organization in the Case of Blind Children

Abstract

The relation between color cognition and color terms is a popular issue in the domain of language cognition. Until now, three theories have emerged: (1) the general evaluation theory of color terms, which asserts that color terms and color cognition are independent; (2) the hypothesis of linguistic reality, which declares that color terms affect color cognition; and (3) a compromised view, which integrates the previous two views. Almost all earlier studies have been conducted on sighted subjects. The dearth of studies on blind people could possibly be explained by people's belief that the blind cannot see colors. Using the methods of testing of color concepts and classification of color words, this study investigated the understanding and organization of the color words of blind children. The materials were 11 basic Chinese color terms: black, white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, palm, grey, and pink. The color terms were printed on cards, using Braille. The subjects were 85 blind children, out of which 63 were born blind and 22 were turned blind after birth. Further, 55 of the subjects were primary school pupils, and 30 were middle school pupils. The experiment involved two stages: In the first stage, the subjects were asked to name colors by touching the cards on which the Braille color words were printed and to provide some examples with regard to that color from their daily life; in the second stage, they were asked to sort the color cards into groups according to their own standards. The results were as follows. First, the order of the color concepts that the blind children got through in the test were similar to the order of the color naming by the sighted children; however there also existed differences. Second, in the semantic spaces of the color words, both the blind and sighted children manifested "colorness/colorlessness" dimensions; while the sighted children manifested the "cold color/warm color" dimension, the blind children manifested the "things' color/setting color" dimension. Third, the organization of the blind children's color concepts was characterized by thematic associations and slot-filler associations, these kinds of relations being based on the individuals' knowledge and experience, thereby emphasizing the functions of things, contexts, and the relations of events. The findings of the study were as follows: (1) there were similarities as well as differences between the order of the color concepts that the blind children got through in the test and the order of the color naming by the sighted children, and (2) the blind children manifested the "colorness/colorlessness" and "things' color/setting color" dimensions in their semantic space of color words, and the organization of the color concepts of blind children was characterized by thematic associations and slot-filler associations.