Seeing the blues (fwd)

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Published online: 30 April 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070430-2

Seeing the blues
Having different words for light and dark blue may change how you see  
them.

Michael Hopkin
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070430/full/070430-2.html

Which is different? Russians, who have different words for light and  
dark blue, can hit the answer more quickly.

The language you speak may influence how you perceive colours,  
according to new research. Russian speakers, who have separate words  
for light and dark blue, are better at discriminating between the  
two, suggesting that they do indeed perceive them as different colours.

Russian speakers divide what the English language regard as 'blue'  
into two separate colours, called 'goluboy' (light blue) and  
'siniy' (dark blue). And a test now shows that this seems to help  
them view light and dark blue as distinct.

Researchers led by Jonathan Winawer of Massachusetts Institute of  
Technology in Cambridge presented Russian and English speakers with  
sets of three blue squares, two of which were identical shades with a  
third 'odd one out'. They asked the volunteers to pick out the  
identical squares.

Russian speakers performed the task more quickly when the two shades  
straddled their boundary between goluboy and siniy than when all  
shades fell into one camp. English speakers showed no such distinction.

What's more, when the researchers interfered with volunteers' verbal  
abilities by asking them to recite a string of numbers in their head  
while performing the task, the Russian effect vanished. This shows  
that linguistic effects genuinely do influence colour perception,  
they report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.

Do you see what I see? To English speakers, this is a range of a  
single colour. But that's not true in other languages.

"It could be that there is a pre-existing tendency to divide colours  
that exists in everyone, and that Russian has exploited but English  
has not," Winawer says.

I say blue, you say goluboy

The results support a theory called the Whorfian Hypothesis, proposed  
in the 1930s by American linguist Benjamin Whorf, that our words  
literally shape how we categorize things we observe in the world  
around us.

"The critical difference in this case is not that English speakers  
cannot distinguish between light and dark blues, but rather that  
Russian speakers cannot avoid distinguishing them: they must do so to  
speak Russian in a conventional manner," Winawer and his colleagues  
write.

"Russian is a very interesting test case," comments Angela Brown, who  
studies colour perception at Ohio State University in Columbus. Only  
around 5% of languages make a distinction between light and dark  
blue, she says.

But Brown argues that although Winawer's results are consistent with  
the theory that language shapes perception, they do not necessarily  
prove it. The order of cause and effect could be the other way  
around, she says. Most languages with a range of words for blue tend  
to be found at high northern latitudes, she points out. Perhaps there  
is a physiological effect that makes people in these climes more  
adept at seeing shades of blue.

There is no direct evidence for this. But it is known that many  
tropical peoples do not distinguish between blue and green —  
linguists call this combined colour 'grue'. It has been suggested  
that this is because their lenses are more yellowed, or their retinas  
damaged, by bright sunlight, Brown says. This implies that physical  
effects might shape language, rather than language shaping perception.

"The question the researchers will have to answer is whether Russians  
have a word for light blue because they see it as distinct, or  
whether it is the other way around," Brown says.

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