colour adjectives

Fri Nov 4 21:07:58 UTC 2011

To add an anecdote to this discussion, when he was about 3 years old my nonverbal son with autism tried to elicit colour names, using his usual request for names method of triadic joint attention [pointing and eye contact], and an interrogative grunt.  We misunderstood him and only supplied object names, to his frustration.  He gathered together several blocks, one of which had a red side, pointing to them all in turn.  When I said 'red block' he asked for many repetitions, then gathered all his red toys together, and made a circling gesture to include them all, using his request for information grunt.  He reacted with astonishment when I labelled one of them 'orange', a word he'd only known to mean the fruit.  He acquired 'red' in comprehension that day, and quickly added 'yellow' and 'green'.  By asking for colour names insistently, within two weeks he had acquired 10 colour words and the generic 'colour'.  

He initially inquired about primary colour names, then went into hue and shade territories of 'pinkish orange' and 'pale blue'.  This line of enquiry rapidly revealed parental dialectal and perceptual differences between 'green' and 'blue', and in neutrals such as 'beige', 'tan', and 'fawn' etc.    His acquisition of colour words occurred when he had 225 words in his receptive lexicon, and 9 protowords and gestures.

Deborah Gibson
 CIRCA (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration in Autism)
The University of British Columbia

On 2011-11-04, at 12:49 PM, Susan Gelman wrote:

> Here is an old-ish paper that we did on color term knowledge in U.S. kids.  Interestingly, we found that kids with preschool experience did better than those without:
> 
> Shatz, M., Behrend, D., Gelman, S. A., & Ebeling, K. S. (1996). Colour term knowledge in two-year-olds: Evidence for early competence. Journal of Child Language, 23, 177-199.
> 
> 
> On Nov 4, 2011, at 3:36 PM, Sonal Chitnis wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Thanks for coming up with nice topic and the discussion  about acquisition of naming of colours.
>>    In India, we  normally see children of age 3 yrs and beyond start comprehending more than 2 basic colours and/ sorting colours as well. In my opinion may be because of competitive world and education system, many parents try introducing colour and shape concept by 2yrs of age. I have seen my niece naming and sorting triangle, circle and square with their respective colours ( blue, red, green)  in which they were painted when she was just two and half and in an interview at the time of preschool/ KG admission was asked to name. Many reputed schools now a days conduct an informal parent child interview at the time of admission and selection is based on the performance.
>>  
>>       Teaching/ introducing color-shape concept at the early childhood may vary in education and attitude of parents, and socioeconomic status,etc. I observed that many mothers mostly from urban areas would like to see the child to be brilliant / a prodigy and they try to start introducing alphabet, color, shapes, action words and rhymes  at very early age and if the child is not learning it faster or having difficulty they rush to pediatrician and SLP's!
>>  
>> 
>>  
>> On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 7:19 AM, Lorraine McCune <mccune at rci.rutgers.edu> wrote:
>> I remember giving this information to my daughter some years ago when her daughter was about 18 months old. She promptly taught my granddaughter to name the color pink. She reliaby discriminated pink and non-pink. I so not remember what happened afterward! A niece learned "yellow" as a first color word at about three. For a long time all color questions were answered with "yellow"!
>> 
>> On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 4:07 PM, suse <sgrass at gmx.net> wrote:
>> dear colleagues,
>> i am setting up an experiment in which i want to use children's naming of certain aspects of an object as dependent variable.
>> could someone by any chance tell me at which age children are able to reliably (!) name 3-6 basic colours? i kind-of remember that it is surprisingly late...
>> 
>> thanks a lot indeed,
>> Susanne
>> 
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>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Lorraine McCune, EdD
>> Chair, Department of Educational Psychology
>> Graduate School of Education
>> Rutgers University
>> 10 Seminary Place
>> New Brunswick, NJ 08901
>> 
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>> 
>> -- 
>> Ms Sonal V Chitnis
>> Lecturer In Speech Language Pathology
>> Bharati Vidyapeeth University School of Audiology & Speech Language Pathology,
>> 4th Floor, Homeopathy Hospital building,
>> Katraj-Dhankawadi,
>> Pune- 411043.
>> Tel: 020 24377417
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> 
> Susan A. Gelman
> Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of Psychology
> 530 Church St.
> University of Michigan
> Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1043
> 
> tel.:  734.764.0268
> fax: 734.615.0573
> e-mail:  gelman at umich.edu
> 
> http://sitemaker.umich.edu/gelman.lab/home
> 
> 
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