Color categories colored by language
March 5th, 2008 by David Weinberger
New research shows that babies’ perception of color changes once they learn language.
This is not surprising, is it? We already knew that cultures classify colors differently. In fact, this research was done by one of the lead investigators in that field. Pretty clearly, this is an environmentally-caused difference. Language learning is the obvious culprit. Still, this helps to know:
When infant eyes absorb a world of virgin visions, colors are processed purely, in a pre-linguistic parts of the brain. As adults, colors are processed in the brain’s language centers, refracted by the concepts we have for them.
