Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination

By Jonathan Winawer, Nathan Witthoft, Michael C. Frank, Lisa Wu, Alex R. Wade, Lera Boroditsky. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007

839 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb061d06766e127988316ff17e29822c66322c36

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Representation of colour concepts in bilingual cognition: The case of Japanese blues* (2010, background): “In a speeded colour discrimination task, where participants had to decide which colour was the odd one out in a triad of colour stimuli, Russian speakers were faster to discriminate between a light and a dark shade of blue than English speakers, presumably because Russian makes an obligatory lexical”
The Senses in Language and Culture (2011, background): “boundary (Winawer et al. 2007), but if you occupy their language capacity with another concurrent task, the effect disappears.”
Extracommunicative functions of language: Verbal interference causes selective categorization impairments (2009, result): “The online nature of the effects of language on categorization and perception is further supported by studies showing that verbal interference reduces or eliminates this linguistic modulation (Gilbert, Regier, Kay, & Ivry, 2006; Roberson & Davidoff, 2000; Winawer et al., 2007).”
The Centrality of Language in Human Cognition (2016, background): “In affecting how something is mentally represented, are effects of language limited to “cognitive” processes like categorization, memory, and reasoning (see below) or can language change how something is actually processed at a perceptual level? The answer is that language has now been shown to affe”
Perceiving and remembering events cross-linguistically: Evidence from dual-task paradigms (2010, background): “…findings It is important to note that our findings show striking convergence with two other recent studies that ask whether native language influences human performance on perceptual-cognitive tasks in the presence of a secondary interference task (Gilbert et al., 2008; Winawer et al., 2007).”
Cognitive Penetration of Colour Experience: Rethinking the Issue in Light of an Indirect Mechanism (2012, background): “For example, it has been claimed that which colour concepts one possesses can affect one’s judgements (and the speed of one’s judgements) about colour (Winawer et al. 2007) and possession of concepts pertaining to types of animal based on the patterns of marking on their hide affects one’s…”
Language as shaped by the brain. (2008, background): “…and Elman (1995) demonstrated how cross-generational learning by sequential learning devices can model the gradual historical change in English verb inflection from a complex past tense system in Old English to the dominant “regular” class and small classes of “irregular” verbs of modern English.”
The Origin of Biases in Face Perception (2009, result): “The Whorfian hypothesis also has recent support from work examining color discrimination in Russian versus English speakers (Winawer et al., 2006).”
Varieties of cognitive penetration in visual perception. (2014, neutral): “Furthermore, Winawer et al. (2007) demonstrated the influence of basic semantic categories on perception.”
A Connectionist Approach to Embodied Conceptual Metaphor (2010, background): “The possibility that speakers of different languages might categorize or even perceive the world in different ways has been a focus of scrutiny in recent work (e.g., Boroditsky et al., 2003; Majid et al., 2004; Winawer et al., 2007).”
Language as a Tool for Interacting Minds (2010, background): “Recently, the latter view has gained more momentum, with studies finding cultures with colour divisions that do not have the ‘natural’ colours as their focal points (Davidoff et al., 1999; Roberson et al., 2000; Roberson et al., 2005; Winawer et al., 2007).”
The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets. (2013, positive): “Winawer et al. (2007) finds that Russian speakers do better than English speakers in distinguishing blues when the two colors span the goluboy/siniy border (but not when then do not), and that these differences are eliminated when subjects must simultaneously perform a verbal (but not a spatial) dis”
An online color naming experiment in Russian using Munsell color samples (2018, methodology): “The 2 “Russian blues” also reveal a category boundary effect as measured by reaction times in an ABX discrimination task.(19) PURPLE area.”