Color, Language, And Perceptual Categorization Lab Report

Color, Language, And Perceptual Categorization - Lab Report Example EXPERIMENTS IN CATEGORICAL PERCEPTION AND LANGUAGE The languages of South Africa have provided researcherer with the opportunity to study categorical perception across cultures. It was discovered that the South African language uses one color term for a color region while the English language needs two terms to describe the same color region. Some languages use a single term for green and blue, orange and yellow, etc. There was no boundary between the two colors in terms of their perception. The question that arose out of these studies was, do the people that speak these different languages have different perceptual boundaries as well? In answer to this question, researchers showed participants one color and then a stimuli of different colors. The participants were to identify stimuli that were the same as the target. By manipulating the target and the distracters from the same or different categories, CP effects could be studied. Using this mechanism, it was discovered that in compa rison to English speakers, African speakers were able to identify a particular hue in one word but the English speakers needed two words to describe the same hue. English speakers were faster when the distracters are green and the target was blue and vice versa for African speakers. However, when the distracters and the target were both blue and both green, English speakers were slower than African speakers. In a task in which participants were shown three colors and asked to â€Å"pick the odd one out,† English speakers picked a color different than the other two categories. African speakers did not show a bias because all three colors were in the same color category. Similar studies have recently compared the effects of language on color by comparing speakers of English and Berinmo.... In this experiment, participants were trained to categorize colors across new color boundaries and separate two types of hue referred to by the same English term. The participants’ discrimination skills were then tested along with their ability to discriminate between colors on different sides of a learned category. It was concluded that through training, CP effects were achieved. Another experiment was performed testing color discrimination. The participants were shown colors separately with a 5-s interval in between. This task involved memory and perception. When people use memory, they use verbal labels which lead to CP. The results of this experiment suggest that improved color discrimination could have been due to simple learning tricks rather than real learned behavior. In still another experiment, participants were tested in a discrimination exercise that required no memory because the two colors were shown at the same time. Color discrimination improved only across the new color category boundary. Currently, an investigation is being held to determine if color category learning can result in detection of color differences. Results have shown that this occurs mainly for hues within the learned boundary. People pay more attention to color boundary regions when they learn a new color category and improvement only occurs in those color regions. As a result of these studies and experiments, one could conclude that there is a "possibility" that language affects color perception.