bèta-gammabachelorthemaiii.docVIP

Bèta-gamma bachelor: THEMA III The Physical Principles Underlying the Emergence of Basic Color Terms in Language By Anne-Margot Lambers (0590932), David Schoon (0299820), and A?cha Laghmouchi (5818176) Abstract In many languages, similarities are found between the ways in which colors are being categorized into Basic Color Terms. This suggests that there is an underlying, physical mechanism responsible for the emergence of these Color Terms in languages. This paper focuses on finding these mechanisms by studying the biology of human color perception. A literature study was conducted, as well as an experiment. Given the fact that there are two separate categories for the color blue in Russian language (goluboj and sinji), the aim was to find out whether Dutch/English speaking subjects would make a similar distinction when asked to divide the color blue into two separate categories. The results of the experiment are not very conclusive, but they do seem to suggest that participants make distinctions that are similar to the ones Russians make. This serves as a contribution to a universalistic view on the role of language in cognition. Tutor: Jasper ter Schegget Teacher: Machiel Keestra Amount of words: 7.583 (including boxes). Date: 22 January 2010 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 3 2. The role of language in cognition 5 2.1. Relativism 5 2.2. Universalism 6 2.3. Different views on Russian blues 7 3. From Color spectrum to Color language 9 3.1. From color spectrum to neural response 9 Box A: CIE, an input-based modeling of the colored world. 13 3.2 From neural response to color vision 14 Box B: Munsell, an output-based modeling of color perception. 15 3.4 From color vision to color terms 16 3.5 Conclusion to this chapter 19 4. Basis for Sinij and Goluboj 21 5. Experiment 23 5.1 Subjects 23 5.2 Samples 23 5.3 Procedure 24 5.4 Circumstances 25 5.5 Analysis of results 25 5.6 Results 27 5.7 Conclusion of experiment 27 5.8 Discussion of experiment 29 6. Con