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Re: NATLANG: Colours

From:Mark P. Line <mark@...>
Date:Saturday, April 24, 2004, 18:12
Javier BF said:
>>> Also, RED is a more salient percept than BLUE, so a >>> linguistic category for RED arises sooner than one for >>> BLUE, >> >>How is this salience determined? > > Intuition based on everyday experience, and experiments > that confirm it.
Experiments that confirm that red is more salient than blue for all humans as a hard-wired perceptual phenomenon, irrespective of language and culture? Or is it merely the case that red is intuitively more salient for the researchers and their test subjects drawn from the researchers' own cultural environment? I don't have an opinion either way, it's just that I'm suspicious of generalizations along the lines of "everybody knows that, it's intuitively obvious" -- especially when we're talking about phenomena that are supposed to be human universals. -- Mark

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Mark P. Line <mark@...>