1.3 Colour perception and language

As the ‘fish scene’ example illustrated, even when people focus on the same scene, they can still see the world differently depending on their cultural background. Sometimes these differences can be down to the physical environments that people have experienced during their lives.

For example, research has examined colour perception in Norwegian adults born above and below the Arctic Circle. Above the Arctic Circle there is a complete absence of sunlight during the winter months known as mørketid (‘dark time’ in Norwegian), and during the summer months the sun remains above the horizon at night (a period known as the midnattsol or ‘midnight sun’). Laeng et al. (2007) found that those who were born above the Arctic Circle with early experience of mørketid (i.e. experience with purple/indigo shades of twilight during the first few months of life) were better at discriminating different hues of purple and worse at discriminating different hues of green than those born below the Arctic Circle.

In addition, Laeng et al. also found that those who were born above the Arctic Circle and during mørketid performed worse on tests of colour perception than those who were born during midnattsol. These findings suggest that the types of colours people are exposed to in the first few months of life can have a lasting impact on their perception of colour as an adult. 

As well as the physical environment, it has been suggested that variations in language can affect how people see colour. Complete Activity 3 to learn more.

Activity 3

The box in Figure 4 shows a coloured block. What colour do you perceive?

Figure 4 Coloured square 1

The box below in Figure 5 shows another coloured block. What colour do you perceive?

Figure 5 Coloured square 2.

(A text entry box would appear here, but your browser does not support it.)

Discussion

You may have perceived the first coloured box as blue and the second box as green. In the English language there is a distinction between ‘blue’ and ‘green’. However this distinction is not made in all of the world’s languages. Some languages do not distinguish between ‘blue’ and ‘green’ and instead have an umbrella term, covering both what English speakers would call green and what they would call blue – some researchers have referred to this as ‘grue’ (Grandison, Davies and Sowden, 2014). For example, a dialect of the Otjiherero language spoken by the Himba, a semi-nomadic tribe who live in Namibia, use the term ‘burou’, for both ‘blue’ and ‘green’.

People who speak languages that use a term for ‘grue’, such as burou, may perceive both of the coloured boxes as being different versions of the same colour. Figure 6 shows how the different colours are categorised depending on whether the language has the distinct terms ‘blue’ and ‘green’ or whether the term ‘grue’ is used. To explore how you categorise blue and green relative to the rest of the world, you can check out the activity at the following link: Is my blue your blue?.

Figure 6 Categorisation of ‘grue’, ‘blue’ and ‘green’.

Activity 3 demonstrated that what is categorised as a particular colour can vary across languages or cultures. Experience with language therefore influences children’s ability to categorise colour. Children need to learn the names of different colours, and research has suggested that learning the correct terms for different colours is quite a difficult task (Maule, Skelton and Franklin, 2023). The ability to match simple colour terms to the ‘correct’ colour (e.g. matching the word ‘blue’ to the colour blue) isn’t something that children master until around three years of age (Pitchford and Mullen, 2002). One reason children do not achieve this earlier is because it takes children a while to learn the boundaries of each colour. For example, in many languages there is a single term to describe light and dark blue (e.g. English ‘blue’, Mandarin Chinese ‘lan’), but in Mongolian, light blue (‘qinker’) and dark blue (‘huhe’) have different terms to describe them (He et al., 2019) and children need to learn the boundary between the two. This is difficult because the environment can influence the appearance of a colour. Consider, for example, the colour of the fruit in Figure 7. The same fruit bowl is presented under three different lighting conditions, slightly changing the colour. Children, nevertheless, still need to learn that a banana is yellow, even under a blueish light. The ability to perceive the same colour under different lighting conditions is known as colour constancy.

Figure 7 A bowl of fruit under different lighting conditions.

A study by Witzel et al. (2021) looked at the relationship between three- to four-year-old children’s ability to name colours and their ability to perceive a colour as constant under different lighting conditions. To do this, they measured whether children could correctly name different colours (e.g. being able to state ‘This object is red’), and whether they could recognise different types of red even under different lighting conditions (e.g. under green or blue lighting). Witzel et al. found that there was a relationship between performance on the two tasks: children who were better at naming colours were also better at recognising the same colour under different lighting.

Just because two things are related, however, doesn’t mean that one thing causes a change in the other. Witzel et al. speculated about possible reasons for the relationship. One possibility is that, as colour constancy improves with age, this helps children recognise that different types of red all belong to the same colour. Alternatively, children may learn about colour naming through their interactions with other people (e.g. their parent might point out a red apple under bluish light) and this could help children learn about colour constancy. It could also be a completely unrelated perceptual ability that leads to improvements in both colour naming and colour constancy. This exploration of how children learn to perceive and label colours is an ongoing area of psychological research.

Taken together, the research in this section demonstrates that children learn to categorise colour according to appropriate language or cultural conventions, which can differ across those languages and cultures. In addition, there are other perceptual processes, such as learning to recognise colour constancy, which are also related to colour naming.