The Acquisition of Color Words

Our experience of color results from a complex interplay of our perceptualand linguistic systems. At the lowest level of perception, our visualsystem transforms the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectruminto a rich 3D experience of color. Despite our ability to discriminatemillions of different color shades, most languages categorize color intodiscrete color categories. Perception provides constraints on the likelylocations of color word boundaries but does not fully define color wordmeanings. Once acquired, although language likely does not influence thelowest levels of color perception, language does influence our memory andprocessing speed of color. One approach to examining the relationshipbetween perception and language in forming our experience of color is tostudy children as they acquire color language. Children produce color wordsin speech for many months to years before acquiring adult-like meanings forcolor words. Research in this area has focused on whether children’sdifficulties stem from 1) an inability to identify color properties as alikely candidate for words meanings or alternatively 2) inductive learningof language specific color word boundaries. Supporting the first account,there is evidence that children more readily attend to object traits likeshape rather than color as likely candidates for word meanings; however,children seem to have successfully identified color a candidate for wordmeaning before they begin to produce color words in speech. There is alsoevidence that pre-linguistic infants, like adults, perceive colorcategorically. While these perceptual categories likely constrain themeanings that children consider, they cannot fully define color wordmeanings because languages vary in both the number of location of colorword boundaries. Recent evidence suggests that the delay in color wordacquisition primarily stems from an inductive process of refining theseboundaries.