Delving Deeper Into Color Space.

Yasmina Jraissati,Igor Douven

doi:10.1177/2041669518792062

Abstract

So far, color-naming studies have relied on a rather limited set of color stimuli. Most importantly, stimuli have been largely limited to highly saturated colors. Because of this, little is known about how people categorize less saturated colors and, more generally, about the structure of color categories as they extend across all dimensions of color space. This article presents the results from a large Internet-based color-naming study that involved color stimuli ranging across all available chroma levels in Munsell space. These results help answer such questions as how English speakers name a more complex color set, whether English speakers use so-called basic color terms (BCTs) more frequently for more saturated colors, how they use non-BCTs in comparison with BCTs, whether non-BCTs are highly consensual in less saturated parts of the solid, how deep inside color space basic color categories extend, or how they behave on the chroma dimension.

Highlights

We name colorful objects on a daily basis; yet, it seems we tend to use mostly a subset of a vast number of available color expressions
We had two main questions: First, how do people name the inner parts of Munsell? Second, if basic color terms (BCTs) are overwhelmingly used at the surface of the system, how would their structure vary along the chroma dimension? To this end, we designed a naming experiment as similar as possible to the World Color Survey (WCS), with the main difference that it included a large number of intermediately and poorly saturated Munsell colors
Our study confirmed that English speakers overwhelmingly use BCTs in their color naming

Summary

Introduction

We name colorful objects on a daily basis; yet, it seems we tend to use mostly a subset of a vast number of available color expressions. In contemporary English, we tend to refer to the color of objects using terms like black, white, red, blue, green, yellow, brown, pink, orange, purple, gray more often than we use terms like tan, peach, or violet (Lindsey & Brown, 2014; Sturges & Whitfield, 1995). The apparently preferred color expressions have come to be known as ‘‘basic color terms’’ (or BCTs, for short).. The apparently preferred color expressions have come to be known as ‘‘basic color terms’’ (or BCTs, for short).1 These observations result partly from color-naming studies. Most color-naming studies conducted in the past century have used the Munsell system (Munsell, 1941). The best known studies—Berlin and Kay’s (1969) study and work building on it—relied on the 330 color

Objectives

Results

Conclusion