DOES the language you speak affect the way you perceive the world? Jules Davidoff, a psychologist at Goldsmith College in London, claims that it does.
His new study challenges the idea that colour perception is universal. Since 1972 research by Eleanor Rosch, now at the University of California at Berkeley, has dominated the field. She compared colour discrimination by North Americans with that of the Dani from Irian Jaya, Indonesia. The Dani use only two words to describe all the colours they see, whereas English speakers normally distinguish 11 separate colours, including black, white and grey.
Rosch asked the volunteers to remember a colour they were shown, then pick it out from similar ones. She concluded from her results that despite differences in the way the two groups described colour, the American and Dani volunteers made very similar errors, evidence that they were perceiving colours in the same way.
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