A Whorfian speed bump? Effects of Chinese color names on recognition across hemispheres

Recent research has provided impressive new evidence of linguistic (“Whorfian”) effects on cognition, much of it focused on categorical perception of colors, usually focusing on a single contrast (e.g., blue/green). This research has raised new questions about the location, timing, and robustness of such effects, some of which we addressed in two studies, one on color naming and one on color memory. In Experiment 1 we presented a wide array of colors in the right visual field (RVF) and left visual field (LVF), and found that easy-to-name colors were named more quickly than hard-to-name colors in the RVF, but not the LVF. In Experiment 2 participants studied easy-to-name and hard-to-name colors carefully, then were tested on a recognition memory task. Accuracy did not differ across conditions, but easy-to-name colors took longer to recognize than hard-to-name colors, and recognition was faster in the LVF than the RVF for both easy-to-name and hard-to-name colors. The results suggest that: (1) linguistic effects on color discrimination cannot be restricted to the left hemisphere, as is often assumed; (2) faster implicit naming of colors (i.e., lexical accessibility) does not yield faster color recognition, but slower; and (3) varying effects on timing are most likely a byproduct of the relative specialization of color discrimination to the right hemisphere and of linguistic discrimination to the left hemisphere. Overall, these results suggest that linguistic effects on color cognition are more robust, distributed, and diverse than previously acknowledged. Implications of this research for the distributed, dynamical, and ecological nature of language, color, and cognition are explored.