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Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space
Open accessAbstract
The nature of color categories in the world's languages is contested. One major view holds that color categories are organized around universal focal colors, whereas an opposing view holds instead that categories are defined at their boundaries by linguistic convention. Both of these standardly opposed views are challenged by existing data. Here, we argue for a third view based on a proposal by Jameson and D'Andrade [Jameson KA, D'Andrade RG (1997) in Color Categories in Thought and Language , eds Hardin CL, Maffi L (Cambridge Univ Press, Cambridge, U.K.), pp 295–319]: that color naming across languages reflects optimal or near-optimal divisions of an irregularly shaped perceptual color space. We formalize this idea, test it against color-naming data from a broad range of languages and show that it accounts for universal tendencies in color naming while also accommodating some observed cross-language variation.
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Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities.
Hopfield, J. J. (1982) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.79.8.2554 · Cited by 19,270
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Pragmatic Language Interpretation as Probabilistic Inference
Goodman, N. D., & Frank, M. C. (2016) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2016.08.005 · Cited by 594
How Efficiency Shapes Human Language
Gibson, E., Futrell, R., Piantadosi, S. P., Dautriche, I., Mahowald, K., Bergen, L., & Levy, R. (2019) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2019.02.003 · Cited by 485
Language, thought, and color: Whorf was half right
Regier, T., & Kay, P. (2009) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2009.07.001 · Cited by 406
Self-citationKinship Categories Across Languages Reflect General Communicative Principles
Kemp, C., & Regier, T. (2012) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1218811 · Cited by 284
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Metadata
- Authors
- Regier, T., Kay, P., & Khetarpal, N.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2007-01-23
- Volume
- 104
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1436-1441
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W1984394909
- Cited by
- 409
- References
- 1
- FWCI
- 22.94
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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