Unification of Language and Neural Structure in Color Vision

Abstract

Neurophysiology and linguistics initially pressed different frontiers in the understanding of color and its perception. Advances in both fields have now brought them to a point of overlap with regard to possible physiological structures underlying perception and language (see review by Ratliff (1976)). On one hand, physiological theory traces color perception from initial stimulus in the retina to neural states of the brain, called opponent mechanisms, associated with color recognition. On the other hand, the linguistic theories, concerned with the degree to which color lexicons exhibit cross-cultural variation versus similarity (linguistic unversality), describe color classification with a hierarchical scheme of increasing vocabulary. These theories are based on the observation that all languages share some portion of a set of 11 basic color terms.