Seeing the blues (fwd)

[Robert Lawless]

Hey! They've discovered something that anthropologists have known for, 
what, decades now.

At 12:04 PM 5/2/2007, phil cash cash wrote:
>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.
>
>Visit our newsblog to read and post comments about this story.
>
>