ABSTRACT
Color perception has been a traditional test-case of Whorf ’s principle of linguistic relativity (Whorf, 1940/1956), which states that speakers of different languages evaluate perceptual contrasts differently, influenced by language-specific partitions of reality. Early empirical studies showed that speakers of Zuni, a language that does not lexically separate the colors ‘orange’ and ‘yellow’ but instead uses a single term to describe them, do not distinguish the two colors as accurately or as frequently as English speakers in a recognition memory task (Brown & Lenneberg, 1954; Lenneberg & Roberts, 1956).
