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Not having the word for a color, or living in an environment where it doesn’t feel relevant, does impact your ability to distinguish that color. You can still s
by Swizec 4y ago
Not having the word for a color, or living in an environment where it doesn’t feel relevant, does impact your ability to distinguish that color. You can still see it, of course, but it takes you measurably longer to perceive. Almost like a form of mild color blindness. Like you have to focus harder to tell colors apart if you don’t have a word for them.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0701644104 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0701644104
- Beltalowda 4y agoIt's never been very clear to me that these kind of studies where you measure response time differences (usually measured in tens or hundreds of milliseconds) are really all that insightful, or say all that much about anything meaningful. In this case, the English speakers were actually faster than Russian speakers, and the accuracy was identical, only when "two colours if they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian" were the Russian speakers faster. Plus "English speakers as a group drew nearly the same boundary as did the Russian speakers". In this case it seems like a categorizing problem: it's not that English speakers can't distinguish the colours, it's just that the boundaries of your categories are less clearly defined than in Russian, so it takes a few more brain cycles to select the right category. I think everyone already agrees that some concepts can be easier or harder to express in certain languages (as a simple example, in Dutch there is no word for sibling). I don't really read any support for a "mild colour blindness" in that study.