Blue is in the Language of the Beholder

Unlike English, which lumps different shades of blue together in a single word, Russians have separate terms for light ('goluboy') and dark ('siniy') blue. Perhaps as a result, they appear better able than English speakers to distinguish between the different hues:

Researchers led by Jonathan Winawer of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge presented Russian and English speakers with sets of three blue squares, two of which were identical shades with a third 'odd one out'. They asked the volunteers to pick out the identical squares.

Russian speakers performed the task more quickly when the two shades straddled their boundary between goluboy and siniy than when all shades fell into one camp. English speakers showed no such distinction.

What's more, when the researchers interfered with volunteers' verbal abilities by asking them to recite a string of numbers in their head while performing the task, the Russian effect vanished. This shows that linguistic effects genuinely do influence colour perception, they report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The results, say the researchers, may support the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which posits "that our words literally shape how we categorize things we observe in the world around us." What other perceptions, I wonder, are dependent on language and vary from culture to culture?
Seeing the blues [News@Nature]
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Image: Farl*