Linguistic structure and non-linguistic cognition: English and Russian blues compared

Abstract

The influence of linguistic structure on non-linguistic cognition was investigated by comparing Russian and English behaviour on tasks involving the blue region of colour space. Russians differentiate this region into sinji (“dark blue”) and goluboj (“light blue”); a number of behavioural differences were predicted if these are two basic categories. First, in choosing the most different colour from a triad of colours across the sinij-goluboj boundary, Russians were predicted to “stretch” distances between pairs of colours from different lexical categories and to “shrink” distances between pairs from the same category. Second, in judging the similarity between pairs of colours, Russians were predicted to maximise perceived similarity between pairs from the same category while minimising perceived similarity of pairs from contrasting categories. Third, asked to sort an array of blue colours into groups, Russians were expected to separate light and dark blues more often than English subjects for whom the colours belong to one lexical category. Little evidence was found for any of the predicted differences in behaviour. In part, this seemed to be due to English subjects also attending to differences between dark and light blues. A final experiment showed that English subjects learn to differentiate the blue region of colour space along a light-dark dimension more readily than the comparable green region.

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