They find that Russian speakers, who have separate words for two shades of blue, can discriminate between those shades of blue something like 50 ms faster than they can discriminate between two shades of blue that fall into the same color word category.
First thing to note, that's a very small difference.
Second thing: the effect goes away under verbal interference (like when you have the subjects repeat a word over and over again while doing the color discrimination task). So I guess there's an effect of language on color perception, but not while you're talking? It definitely doesn't seem to me that the colors I am perceiving change when I am talking vs. when I am not.
Third, there's a huge overall reaction time difference between the Russian and English speakers in the paper, which calls into question how well the experiment was really run.
So it's not clear that there really are effects of culture/language on color perception; and if they do exist they are very small. (At least that's the conclusion I would draw from this paper, which is widely cited in that field. I'd be interested to hear of different results if they're out there.)
The evidence for effects of language on color perception is very weak, or it indicates that the effects are themselves very weak.
The big paper in this field is this: http://www.languagescience.umd.edu/~ellenlau/courses/ling440...
They find that Russian speakers, who have separate words for two shades of blue, can discriminate between those shades of blue something like 50 ms faster than they can discriminate between two shades of blue that fall into the same color word category.
First thing to note, that's a very small difference.
Second thing: the effect goes away under verbal interference (like when you have the subjects repeat a word over and over again while doing the color discrimination task). So I guess there's an effect of language on color perception, but not while you're talking? It definitely doesn't seem to me that the colors I am perceiving change when I am talking vs. when I am not.
Third, there's a huge overall reaction time difference between the Russian and English speakers in the paper, which calls into question how well the experiment was really run.
So it's not clear that there really are effects of culture/language on color perception; and if they do exist they are very small. (At least that's the conclusion I would draw from this paper, which is widely cited in that field. I'd be interested to hear of different results if they're out there.)