Sentence examples for colour words from inspiring English sources

Colour words get their meanings from their mutual contrasts.

Children learn the central or basic colour words of their language fairly early and at the same time; such terms as red and green are normally learned before subdivisions such as crimson and scarlet or chartreuse.

While the actual colour vocabularies of languages differ, however, research by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay has tried to show that "there exist universally for humans eleven basic perceptual color categories" that serve as reference points for the colour words of a language, whatever number may be regularly employed at any time.

He thought I was an "interesting case", so as well as offering me the usual pabulum – more drugs, but legal ones – he also ran a series of "psychological tests" on me, including the Stroop test, whereby different colour words are flashed up on a screen in different colours, eg "red" is in blue letters.

On the first piece of paper, you'll need to write out a series of colour words for the 'easy' condition: You can use as many colours as you want, but remember that you need to make sure that you use either the same colour for all of the words, or that the ink colour matches the word name.

The task that he developed was simple: participants were given a list of 100 colour words, and had to name out loud the colour in which the word was printed – for instance, if the word "red" was printed in blue, the correct answer was blue.

The Stroop task involved participants being shown a colour word (e.g. 'red') which was coloured either congruently (e.g. the word 'red' was coloured red) or incongruently (e.g. the word 'red' was coloured green).

Marie Rogers is a PhD student with the Sussex Colour Group, investigating how colour word learning influences colour perception and cognition.

When a colour word was presented in a different ink, participants were much slower to name the ink, because that automatic process of reading the word itself was getting in the way.

The gallery notes (as yet no catalogue is available) witter bravely on about 'narrative tension' and the 'relation between line and colour, word and image', but this is just a stab in the dark.

Participants are asked to name the font colour of an incongruent printed colour word (incompatible trials).