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cognition language & learning lab justine explains... learning color words department of psychology, stanford university

Learning Color Words It has been frequently observed that English-speaking children find it difficult to learn the appropriate labels for colors, even after having mastered most of the labels for common objects. Charles Darwin even observed that he mistook his own children for being color-blind! While 4-month-olds can perceptually distinguish between basic color categories, children up to the age of four still struggle to learn the appropriate label to a given hue. Indeed, younger sighted children's use of color words is much like that of blind children; that is, while words like "blue" and "yellow" are in their vocabularies, and are usually produced in appropriate contexts (e.g., "yellow banana"), studies of the specific application of these words reveal that young children's use of them is haphazard. Three-year olds who correctly identify a blue object in one situation may confuse "blue" with "red" in another, and even at age four, some children still struggle to discriminate color words appropriately despite hundreds of explicit training trials. Since color words are frequently encountered in daily life, it is reasonable to ask why they are so difficult for children to learn. In view of the effects of Feature-Label-Ordering (FLO) in symbolic learning, one possible explanation we propose relates to the fact that colors are seldom encountered in isolation. For example, when a child hears the word "red" in an ordinary setting, a wide array of other colors will also likely be present in his or her visual field. (The same is not true for labels for objects; for example, when a child hears the word "dog," monkeys and cows are likely to be absent). Because so many colors are typically present when a color word is heard, children encounter few natural situations that will serve as optimal contexts for learning to discriminate between these colors (e.g., a context in which the child can see only red and hears "red").