Abstract
The hypotheses of Berlin and Kay (1969) of universal constraints on cross-language color naming have been widely accepted and frequently corroborated by later studies of individual languages. They remain controversial, however, challenged on both empirical and methdological grounds, both early and recently (Hickerson 1971, Conklin 1973, Roberson et al. 2000, Lucy 1997, Saunders and van Brakel 1997). The original universalist claims were based on the apparent clustering of naming responses in perceptual color space. The present paper presents initial results of the first objective statistical analysis of the clustering of cross language color naming responses in perceptual color space
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