HENRY

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn’t dead yet, and proponents are still looking for evidence that a person’s language may affect the way they see the world.

Here’s the latest round: Winawer et al in P.N.A.S. look into the speed at which people can distinguish colors. They took speakers of Russian, which distinguishes between light blue colors (“goluboy”) and darker blue colors (“siniy”), and compared them to English speakers (we don’t have elegant color terms, just “light blue” and “dark blue”). Their results show that Russian speakers were faster than the English to discriminate between two blue colors when one was goluboy and the other was siniy. When the two colors were both goluboy or both siniy, they did not have an advantage over the English speakers.

Posted on May 4th, 2007 by Simon Greenhill