Do Hering’s sensations determine lexical color categories?
In principle, languages could create lexical color categories that partition color space in culture-specific ways. Nonetheless, the color categories in the lexicons of world languages are strikingly similar. Why is this so? One traditional explanation is based on Hering’s elemental sensations (redness, greenness, blueness and yellowness), which demarcate privileged regions of color space. Several recent studies have challenged the special status of Hering’s sensations. Are they the cause or the by-product of “red”, “green”, “blue” and “yellow” color categories of the Indo-European languages? Here, we describe the results of three studies that address this issue. The first two studies examined the understanding of Hering’s elemental sensations in subjects speaking languages that are missing terms for some of these sensations. Color naming by the Hadza people is sparse and distributed: most speakers do not use terms for all the Hering sensations (or most other basic color categories of IndoEuropean languages), yet each person uses a different subset of the terms. Thus, the language as a whole demonstrates a complete Hering lexicon, though no idiolect does so. Somali-speaking observers use a term “grue” that does not respect the color boundaries of the Hering color terms, and particularly their term for “yellow” often names colors of every hue. A third study examined the elemental sensations in English-speaking deuteranomalous trichromats. Their initial physiological encoding of color differed from that of color-normal observers. Nevertheless, their choices of broadband lights corresponding to the unique and binary hues of Hering’s theory were similar, but not identical, to those of color normal observers. These results highlight the importance of language in mediating color understanding but are inconsistent with the view that culture alone guides color category formation.