Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Color naming across languages has traditionally been held to reflect the structure of color perception. At the same time, ithas often, and increasingly, been suggested that color naming may be shaped by patterns of communicative need. However,much remains unknown about the factors that drive communicative need, how need interacts with perception, and how thisinteraction may shape color naming systems across languages. We engage these open questions by building on generalinformation-theoretic principles, and on a recent account of color naming that integrates the roles of need and perception.On this basis, we present a systematic evaluation of several factors that may influence need, and that have been proposed inthe literature: capacity constraints, linguistic usage, and the visual environment. Our findings suggest that communicativeneed and resulting patterns of color naming are shaped more by linguistic usage than they are by the visual environmentalone.