Re: NATLANG: Colours

>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?
Well, I really don't know if the experiments showing strong
physical/emotional reactions to red were carried out crossculturally, but
I have just mentioned plenty of reasons that would justify why red is (or
should be) salient independently of cultural conventions: there is a very
good point for our species survival in paying attention to red. I cannot
come up with similar reasons that would justify an instinctive attention
to blue; on the contrary, there is a good reason for blue not to be too
salient for humans: what point would there be in paying much attention to
a colour that is in the sky all around us? If we did so, we would be
living under a constant distress. Also, the use of red to catch attention
seems to work pretty well crossculturally, and the fact that most (maybe
all) languages with only one independent category for a chromatic quality
have the one for red points to the salience of this percept as well.

Cheers,
Javier