The Use of Colour Names Over Repeated Trials

Norelli, Maria Federica, Koliousis, Alexandros, Stockman, Andrew and Mylonas, Dimitris (2023) The Use of Colour Names Over Repeated Trials. In: XVIII Color Conference, Lecco 2023, 15-16 September. 2023.

Abstract

Speakers group colour stimuli into categories that are commonly referred to by a name (e.g. pink, peach, and pale green). While the number of colour names in wide cultural use may vary across different languages, it has been shown that most languages have a small set of basic colour terms (BCTs) that are typically shared by speakers. The cognitive role of BCTs has been a subject of ongoing debate, with some proposing that the existence of primary basic categories may depend on structural and functional properties of the visual system. In this study, we investigate the effects of the duration of the experimental task on the use of colour names. In a lab-based colour naming experiment, we asked 17 English speakers to give unconstrained verbal responses for 216 presented colour samples, presented randomly one at a time against 7 different backgrounds. Test stimuli were 2 degrees uniformly coloured discs with a black outline of 1 pixel. The 216 colour stimuli were uniformly distributed in the CIE LMS parallelepiped. We collected a total of 26,504 unconstrained colour name responses. First, we consider the global entropy of the distribution of responses as a measure of all participants' colour vocabulary richness. We use the order of appearance of the backgrounds to group the responses in 7 bins and measure the entropy of colour naming responses for each bin. Our results show that the richness of colour vocabulary decreases as a function of the task duration. Second, we examine which colour names became more prevalent over trials as the vocabulary became impoverished. We found a positive correlation (R2 = 0.8) between the use of BCTs and time-on-task, and a negative correlation in the case of non-BCTs (R2 = -0.5), supporting that BCTs are easier to name than non-BCTs. However, across participants secondary basics have been used significantly more often (n = 5: brown, orange, grey, purple, and pink) (M = 1039, SD = 67) than primary basics (n = 6: black, blue, green, red, yellow, and white) (M = 773, SD = 49) over each of the 7 ordered backgrounds, t(12) = -8.48, p < .001, suggesting that secondary basics overall may cover larger regions of the cone excitation space than primary basics. Consistent with this explanation, a Pearson analysis showed a strong correlation (R2 = 0.6) between frequency of BTCs and their corresponding volume in LMS cone excitation space.

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