The perception of colors depends on the language!
Scientists from the University of Berlin have conducted a scientific study involving speakers of Greek, German and Russian. Their results showed that the human perception of color is related to the spoken language.
According to the journal Psychological Science, scientists have relied on the well-known hypothesis of linguistic relativity that mental representations depend on linguistic categories, ie that the way in which the world is perceived depends on language, because linguists believe that learning a new language changes consciousness.
The scientists chose (47) Russian , (29) German and (28) Greek speakers for the study, with distinct words: blue and light blue (blue, turquoise, light blue). In German, one word expresses this color, the rest is called light blue.
Scientists showed 13 triangles of different colors on a colored background, light blue on a blue background and light green on a dark green background.
In five cases, the researchers left a blank background to see if participants would notice this trick or not, and then asked the different speakers of languages about the number of triangles seen.
Greek speakers noted all the triangles of blue shades that were presented to them, but sometimes they did not notice the green and the same result applies to Russian speakers. The Germans had no trouble identifying colors, which led scientists to conclude that color perception is directly related to the mother tongue.
This thesis is at the heart of a major controversy in the history of cognitive anthropology, in the early 1960s, psychologists Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg set out to truly test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from experimental observations and showed that the lexicon of colors seemed to have a real influence on the perception and the memory of these by speakers speaking different languages.
Source: Come2innovate
Comments
Post a Comment