The
Development of Colour-Naming in Four- to Seven-Year Old Children:
A Cross-Cultural Study
E.G. Johnson & T. Tomiie |
One
hundred and twenty children from each of four cultural groups (Australian,
Japanese, Greek and Greek/Australian) and ranging in age from 4 to
7 years were required to name twenty colours, these being the most
saturated hues from the Munsell chart. Reliable differences were
found in the mean speed of response by the groups and there were
seen as being related to speed of lexical search. Specific difficulties
in naming were associated with stimuli located at the overlap of
colour categories but the Japanese showed increasing use with age
of a specific term to cope with one of these areas of overlap. The
other national groups employed a large number of qualifying terms
to handle "gaps" in the psychological colour solid. The
developmental evidence pointed to the role of education in hastening
the acquisition of appropriate colour term.
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