Colour blindness and its contribution to colour vocabulary

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2014-10-22
Language
en
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Abstract
Although often studied from a universalist perspective, colour terminology shows cross-linguistic variation. Several causes have been put forward for these differences, including environmental and cultural factors. The current study aims to further investigate the contribution of physiology to colour naming by assessing the relation between colour blindness and colour terminology and the possible mechanisms underlying such a relation. We collated a database of worldwide colour blindness incidence, UV-B irradiance and linguistic information in order to replicate a previous geographical review demonstrating that Daltonism (red-green colour blindness) was related to lati­tude and that a distinction between the terms for 'green' and 'blue' was correlated with Daltonism incidence (Brown and Lindsey, 2004). We extended previous work by performing regression anal­yses and a mediation analysis assessing the contribution of UV-B irradiance to colour vocabulary. We found that previous results stood up in a different, partly overlapping database using different statistica! models and that UV-B plays a significant role in the relation between geographical loca­tion and colour blindness. Together, the studies suggest human physiology as a likely contributor to colour vocabulary.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen