Until then, all she knew was that Monday was red, Tuesday pink… Like Nick Ryan, I have grapheme-colour synaesthesia: letters, numbers, days of the week and months of the year have colours; words take on tones based on the prominent sounds and letters within them.
VALs range in their use of colours, words, symbols, and numbers; inclusion of forecasting or predictive language; structure; number of levels; weighting towards unrest vs. eruptions; and the level of scientific jargon used.
Colour words get their meanings from their mutual contrasts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The researchers have not chosen randomly to focus on colour words.
For colour words, though, this linguistic negotiation is also biased by how we perceive them.
The Dugum Dani people of New Guinea, for example, have only two colour words, which can best be translated as "black" and "white", or dark and light.
