Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Gibson et al. (2017) argued that color naming is shaped bypatterns of communicative need. In support of this claim, theyshowed that color naming systems across languages supportmore precise communication about warm colors than cool col-ors, and that the objects we talk about tend to be warm-coloredrather than cool-colored. Here, we present new analyses thatalter this picture. We show that greater communicative preci-sion for warm than for cool colors, and greater communicativeneed, may both be explained by perceptual structure. How-ever, using an information-theoretic analysis, we also showthat color naming across languages bears signs of communica-tive need beyond what would be predicted by perceptual struc-ture alone. We conclude that color naming is shaped both byperceptual structure, as has traditionally been argued, and bypatterns of communicative need, as argued by Gibson et al. –although for reasons other than those they advanced.