Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We model two patterns related to the acquisition of color termsin Russian and English: children produce overextension errorsfor some colors but not others, and language-specific distinc-tions affect color discrimination in a non-linguistic task. Botheffects, as well as a reasonable convergence with adult linguis-tic behavior, are shown by a Self-Organizing Map trained onnaturalistic input. We investigate the effect of different waysof representing colors, i.e., as perceptual features or in terms ofthe cognitive biases on categorization extracted from crosslin-guistic color naming data. We also consider the influence ofcolor term frequency. Our results suggest effects of all three ofterm frequency, cognitive biases, and perceptual features.