Abstract
Through their thorough investigation of the Hadza, a nonindustrialized language community in Tanzania, Lindsey and colleagues (2015) developed a new approach to understand the evolution of color terms. In the present commentary, I discuss the possibility that some of their results might be explained by the lacking control of saturation of their color stimuli. The saturation of colors plays an important yet widely neglected role in color naming. The additional analyses presented here suggest that the results on Hadzane color naming could be due to variations in saturation in the stimulus set rather than being evidence for universal constraints on color term evolution.
Highlights
The origin of color categories has preoccupied many scientific disciplines because it is the prime example for studying the biological, ecological, and cultural factors that relate language to perception (Kay & Regier, 2006)
The origin of color categories remains unknown. Through their thorough investigation of the Hadza, a nonindustrialized language community in Tanzania, Lindsey, Brown, Brainard, and Apicella (2015) developed a new approach to understand the evolution of color terms
They observed a low consensus in color naming across Hadza observers, which they took as evidence for a low evolutionary level of the Hadzane color lexicon
Summary
The origin of color categories has preoccupied many scientific disciplines because it is the prime example for studying the biological, ecological, and cultural factors that relate language to perception (Kay & Regier, 2006). Color, color naming, cross-cultural comparison, evolution, Hadzane, perception, Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, saturation With respect to the observed cross-cultural motifs, it is important to note that this study measured color naming with a set of color stimuli that varied strongly in chroma and saturation.
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