Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explored how learning a new language can shift how people perceive color. The study appeared in a well-regarded scientific journal focusing on cognitive science and perception.
The findings draw on observations of members of the Tsimane community, an indigenous group living in the Bolivian Amazon. This group has maintained its language and cultural traditions over many generations, with relatively few color terms in the Tsimane language compared to more widely spoken tongues.
A total of 131 participants took part in the research. Among them, 71 spoke only Tsimane, 30 spoke only Spanish, and 30 were bilingual in both Tsimane and Spanish.
In the first activity, participants were shown 84 chips of different colors. They were asked to name each item in their native language, or in Tsimane or Spanish if they were bilingual.
The second activity involved a color grouping exercise. The entire set of 84 colored tiles was presented at once, and participants were asked to sort the chips into color categories according to the terms available in their native language. The aim was to understand how color categorization is shaped by linguistic and cultural background.
Researchers noted that bilingual speakers demonstrated higher accuracy when performing tasks in the Tsimane language. A striking finding was that bilingual Tsimane and Spanish speakers began to distinguish between colors such as blue and green in ways that their native language had not traditionally separated.
The study sheds light on cognitive flexibility and how linguistic concepts integrate into perception. Bilingual Tsimane participants did more than translate color words from Spanish; they created their own local color terms grounded in their experiences with color categorization in Spanish.
Earlier inquiries in this field have explored questions about color perception across species, such as why humans generally perceive color differently from some animals. These lines of inquiry help explain the ongoing evolution of how language shapes what people notice and remember about colors.