The colour cognition of children

Abstract

It is well known that young children have great difficulty in stating the appropriate colour name when presented with a colour stimulus, even though they may be effective at matching one colour stimulus with another and possess a good vocabulary of colour terms. The present studies demonstrate a further, but distinct, impairment in dealing with coloured stimuli. Three- to four-year-old children were given the task of distinguishing an appropriately coloured option from one with an inappropriate colour. Despite displaying a preference for the appropriate colour over the inappropriate one, children found the task very difficult. In contrast, they succeeded on the task more frequently when the alternatives were presented verbally, rather than in terms of two pictures. We discuss the results within a theoretical framework which distinguishes the access to object-colour knowledge from colour naming. The model makes divisions within the mental templates required for object matching. In particular, colour detail is functionally separated from shape detail and appears to be represented in more than one code.