Native Language Promotes Access to Visual Consciousness

Color perception has been a traditional test-case of the idea that the language we speak affects our perception of the world. 1 It is now established that categorical perception of color is verbally mediated and varies with culture and language. 2 However, it is unknown whether the well-demonstrated language effects on color discrimination really reach down to the level of visual perception, or whether they only reflect post-perceptual cognitive processes. Using brain potentials in a color oddball detection task with Greek and English speakers, we demonstrate that language effects may exist at a level that is literally perceptual, suggesting that speakers of different languages have differently structured minds.

It is now established that native language affects one’s perception of the world. However, it is unknown whether this effect is merely driven by conscious, language-based evaluation of the environment or whether it reflects fundamental differences in perceptual processing between individuals speaking different languages. Using brain potentials,we demonstrate that the existence in Greek of 2 color terms—ghalazio and ble—distinguishing light and dark blue leads to greater and faster perceptual discrimination of these colors in native speakers of Greek than in native speakers of English. The visualmismatch negativity, an index of automatic and preattentive change detection, was similar for blue and green deviant stimuli during a color oddball detection task in English participants, but it was significantly larger for blue than green deviant stimuli in native speakers of Greek. These findings establish an implicit effect of language-specific terminology on human color perception.

Color perception has been a traditional test-case of the idea that the language we speak affects our perception of the world. 1 It is now established that categorical perception of color is verbally mediated and varies with culture and language. 2 However, it is unknown whether the well-demonstrated language effects on color discrimination really reach down to the level of visual perception, or whether they only reflect post-perceptual cognitive processes. Using brain potentials in a color oddball detection task with Greek and English speakers, we demonstrate that language effects may exist at a level that is literally perceptual, suggesting that speakers of different languages have differently structured minds. Categorical perception is a term used to describe people's tendency to perceive perceptual continua such as color as discon-tinuous discrete categories, resulting in finer discriminations across category boundaries than within category boundaries. 3,4 It is now widely accepted that categorical perception of color is constrained by language. Whether comparing populations from traditional remote cultures 5-7 or populations matched for technological sophistication and education, 8,9 the findings unequivocally show a discrimination advantage for cross-category over within-category stimuli consistent with the individual's linguistic partition of the color spectrum. This has been shown in both offline similarity judgment tasks 10 as well as in online perceptual matching tasks. 11 However, although these studies suggest that we perceive color categorically, it has been argued that the term Categorical 'Perception' is a misnomer as it is not clear whether response patterns reflect low-level perceptual processes rather than higher-level post-perceptual memory or language processes. 12-14 Thus we cannot dismiss the assumption of a set of universal color categories, which are hard-wired in the human visual system. 15-17 In Thierry, Athanasopoulos, Wiggett, Dering and Kuipers, 18 we measured brain potentials in Greek and English speakers to test the extent to which pre-attentive and unconscious aspects of perception are affected by an individual's native language. Greek differentiates between a light (ghalazio) and a dark (ble) shade of blue. 19 In two experimental blocks, all stimuli were light or dark blue and in the other two blocks the stimuli were light or dark green. We instructed participants to press a button when and only when they saw a square shape (target, probability 20%) within a regularly paced stream of circles (probability 80%). Within one block the most frequent stimulus was a light or dark circle (standard , probability 70%) and the remaining stimuli were circles of the same hue with a contrasting luminance (deviant, probability 10%), i.e., dark if the standard was light or vice versa. Crucially, in this study we analyzed brain wave patterns only for deviance in the color of the circles, not the shape of the stimulus, which was the focus of attention. We expected luminance deviants to elicit visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) in all blocks, indexing pre-attentive change detection, which requires no active response on the part of the participants. 20-22 The vMMN is elicited by deviant (rare) stimuli in visual oddball paradigms, independently of the direction of focused attention 22 and is therefore considered automatic and pre-attentive. 21,22 Consistent with our predictions, we found a vMMN effect of similar magnitude for blue and green contrasts in native speakers of English, but Greek participants perceived luminance deviants as more different in the blue than in the green blocks, which led to a greater vMMN effect for blues. We subsequently explored differences at earlier latencies, focusing on the so-called P1, that is, the first positive peak elicited by visual stimuli over parietooc-cipital regions of the scalp, to test for potential differences between participant groups in a time frame associated with activity in the primary and secondary visual cortices. 23 To our surprise, analysis of mean peak latencies and mean signal amplitudes between 100 and 130 ms revealed that the P1 peak followed a pattern of differences

2020

Does language change what we perceive? Does speaking different languages cause us to perceive things differently? We review the behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for the influence of language on perception, with an emphasis on the visual modality. Effects of language on perception can be observed both in higher-level processes such as recognition, and in lower-level processes such as discrimination and detection. A consistent finding is that language causes us to perceive in a more categorical way. Rather than being fringe or exotic, as they are sometimes portrayed, we discuss how effects of language on perception naturally arise from the interactive and predictive nature of perception.

Current Biology, 2007

The validity of the linguistic relativity principle continues to stimulate vigorous debate and research. The debate has recently shifted from the behavioural investigation arena to a more biologically grounded field, in which tangible physiological evidence for language effects on perception can be obtained. Using brain potentials in a colour oddball detection task with Greek and English speakers, a recent study suggests that language effects may exist at early stages of perceptual integration [Thierry, G., Athanasopoulos, P., Wiggett, A., Dering, B., & Kuipers, J. (2009). Unconscious effects of language-specific terminology on pre-attentive colour perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 4567–4570]. In this paper, we test whether in Greek speakers exposure to a new cultural environment (UK) with contrasting colour terminology from their native language affects early perceptual processing as indexed by an electrophysiological correlate of visual detection of colour luminance. We also report semantic mapping of native colour terms and colour similarity judgements. Results reveal convergence of linguistic descriptions, cognitive processing, and early perception of colour in bilinguals. This result demonstrates for the first time substantial plasticity in early, pre-attentive colour perception and has important implications for the mechanisms that are involved in perceptual changes during the processes of language learning and acculturation.

Cognition, 2020

Cross-Cultural Research, 2005

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007

English and Russian color terms divide the color spectrum differently. Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues ("goluboy") and darker blues ("siniy"). We investigated whether this linguistic difference leads to differences in color discrimination. We tested English and Russian speakers in a speeded color discrimination task using blue stimuli that spanned the siniy/goluboy border. We found that Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian (one siniy and the other goluboy) than when they were from the same linguistic category (both siniy or both goluboy). Moreover, this category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but not a spatial, dual task. These effects were stronger for difficult discriminations (i.e., when the colors were perceptually close) than for easy discriminations (i.e., when the colors were further apart). English speakers tested on the i...

Proceedings of the …, 2009

The effect of language on the categorical perception of color is stronger for stimuli in the right visual field (RVF) than in the left visual field, but the neural correlates of the behavioral RVF advantage are unknown. Here we present brain activation maps revealing how language is ...