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Color Naming, Multidimensional Scaling, and Unique Hue Selections in English and Somali Speakers Do Not Show a Whorfian Effect

Lange, Ryan
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9147-9066
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1449158554

Abstract Details

2015, Master of Science, Ohio State University, Vision Science.
The Whorfian linguistic relativity hypothesis is a highly contested model linking cognition and perception, in which substantial cultural-linguistic differences between languages are proposed, which significantly constrain in individual’s perception and world view. Due to the wide variation in color naming in cultures around the world, the constraints on naming imposed by color physics and the physiology of the visual system, and the near-ubiquitous nature of color communication, color naming has often been used as a model for testing linguistic relativity effects. However, by themselves, variations in color naming cannot give any useful information about whether color perception is affected by linguistic relativity. For this reason, we used color naming in conjunction with unique hue selection and multidimensional scaling (MDS) to test for the presence of Whorfian effects related to color naming for speakers of English and Somali, a language previously shown by our lab to show great inter-individual variation in both color naming and non-lexical measures of color perception. In Experiment I we tested English subjects using a non-metric MDS paradigm with heteroluminant stimuli and found it to generally replicate fiducial orderings of stimuli in CIE UV space. Experiment II added a unique hue selection task, and English speakers’ unique hue selections in this task were concordant with those obtained from previous studies. We introduced a new method of MDS data collection, the binary sort protocol, in Experiment III, which allowed us to quickly gather MDS data from English and Somali-speaking subjects. Somali color naming showed similar patterns to previous experiments by our lab, but we were unable to gather data from a sufficient variety of Somali informants to robustly test for Whorfian effects. Somali speakers’ MDS maps conformed more poorly to CIE UV space than English speakers’ maps, though analysis of stress indicated that Somali subjects may use two dimensions of unknown character in their judgments of color difference; additionally, numerous Somali speakers’ MDS maps and/or color naming showed evidence of purple-yellow affiliation, which is contrary to all previous color categorization and perception experiments. Experiment IV focused on English color naming, utilizing the gap statistic and the novel cluster stability analysis to find 15 shared chromatic categories of varying consensus and 4 distinct color-naming motifs among English informants, congruent with previous results from our lab. As in Experiment II and Experiment III, no evidence of linguistic relativity effects was found in our results, though we suggest that our color naming, unique hue, and MDS methodologies may have been insufficiently sensitive to detect these effects if present. We conclude that no definite linguistic relativity effects exist between English and Somali color naming, color difference perception, and unique hue selection, at least as measured by our paradigms.
Delwin Lindsey, PhD (Advisor)
Angela Brown, PhD (Committee Member)
Andrew Hartwick, OD, PhD (Committee Member)
156 p.
Behavioral Psychology; Cognitive Psychology; Experimental Psychology; Linguistics; Psychology
color perception; color cognition; Whorfian; linguistic relativity; color term evolution; Basic Color Terms; unique hues; multidimensional scaling; color naming; color categories; consensus analysis; gap statistic; k-means; procrustes; perceptual modeling

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Lange, R. (2015). Color Naming, Multidimensional Scaling, and Unique Hue Selections in English and Somali Speakers Do Not Show a Whorfian Effect [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1449158554

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Lange, Ryan. Color Naming, Multidimensional Scaling, and Unique Hue Selections in English and Somali Speakers Do Not Show a Whorfian Effect. 2015. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1449158554.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Lange, Ryan. "Color Naming, Multidimensional Scaling, and Unique Hue Selections in English and Somali Speakers Do Not Show a Whorfian Effect." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1449158554

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1449158554
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.