Why spoken Russian can help perceive colours better than English

A recent research has found that spoken language may influence your perception of colours.

Washington, May 1 : A recent research has found that spoken language may influence your perception of colours.

The study, conducted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, compared Russian speakers with English speaking people.

The researchers found that Russian speakers, who have different words for light and dark blue, are superior at distinguishing between the two, signifying that they do in fact see them as two different colours.

Russian speakers split what the English language considers as 'blue' into two separate colours, called 'goluboy' (light blue) and 'siniy' (dark blue).

And a test now demonstrates that it helps them view light and dark blue as two dissimilar colours.

Researchers led by Jonathan Winawer of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge gave the Russian and English speakers sets of three blue squares, two of which were similar shades with a third 'odd one out'.

After distributing the colours, the researchers asked the volunteers to identify the identical squares.

Russian speakers performed the task more speedily when the two shades overlapped their boundary between goluboy and siniy than when all shades fell into one group.

However, the English speakers showed no such characteristic.

When the researchers meddled with volunteers' verbal aptitudes by asking them to narrate a sequence of numbers in their head simultaneously with the task, the Russian effect faded away.

These results show that linguistic effects indisputably do influence colour perception.

"It could be that there is a pre-existing tendency to divide colours that exists in everyone, and that Russian has exploited but English has not," Nature magazine quoted Winawer, as saying.

"The critical difference in this case is not that English speakers cannot distinguish between light and dark blues, but rather that Russian speakers cannot avoid distinguishing them: they must do so to speak Russian in a conventional manner," Winawer and his colleagues write.

"Russian is a very interesting test case," said Angela Brown, who studies colour perception at Ohio State University in Columbus.

However, Brown argued that even if Winawer's results are consistent with the theory that language outlines perception, they do not essentially prove it.

She says that the order of cause and effect could be the opposite and points out that most languages with a variety of words for blue are likely to be found at high northern latitudes.

Brown also charts out a possibility of a physiological effect that makes people in these climates more proficient at seeing shades of blue.

ANI