ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys some of the recently more influential ways of answering the questions. Another related question concerns the relationship between colour naming practices and colour perception. The chapter critically examines two of the main approaches to colour categorization in cognitive science: the perceptual salience theory and linguistic relativism. It turns to reviewing several decades of psychological research on colour categorical perception. Theories of colour categorization can be distinguished by the constraints that they respectively impose on the colour concept formation process. Two constraints, however, appear to be common ground across different theories. Use of highly saturated colour stimuli, Roberson and Hanley argue, may have led researchers to overestimate the similarity of colour categorization systems across different languages. Yendrikhovskij, building on Shepard, links the structure of human colour categorization systems to the statistical distribution of colours in the natural environment.
