Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present a novel statistical analysis of color categorizationusing a standard method from semantic typology. Our ap-proach shows that crosslinguistic color naming data exhibitslatent dimensions whose order of relative importance matchesthe evolutionary ordering of emergence of those distinctions.Moreover, we show that the importance ordering of these di-mensions holds even when controlling for frequency of the dis-tinctions by looking at languages within each stage of evolu-tion. Additionally, we find that the extreme points of the latentcolor dimensions correspond well to a small set of “univer-sal” focal colors. Thus we show that a simple mathematicalmethod simultaneously derives a consistent match both to theevolutionary stages and to the universal foci.