Despite that the monolexemic restriction limits the word choices from the pool of modern color terms, the participants could still have had plenty of choices from traditional, monolexemic color terms like those listed in
Sun & Chen (2018) and Wu's corpus studies (2011, 2014). Sun and Chen's study (2018) demonstrated that their participants of similar backgrounds with ours (young college students in Taiwan) were capable of selecting proper color chips to match historical color terms. They identified multiple color terms to constitute the “color family” (
Sun and Chen, 2018); for example, the concept of green family was composed of five terms with corresponding color chips, 碧 bì, 菜 cài, 翠 cuì, 綠 lù, and 青 qīng, while red family was six: 赤 chì, 丹 dān, 紅 hóng, 血 xuè, 赭 zhě, and 朱 zhū. The Pearson's correlation coefficients (
ρ) between the vectors (each 1 × 320 dimension) for clusters in the present study and some of traditional color terms in Sun and Chen's are reasonably high, for example,
ρ = 0.906 for pink terms, 粉紅 fěnhóng versus 櫻yīng;
ρ =0.871 for brown terms, 咖啡 kāfēi versus 棕 zōng, indicating that color synonyms within a color category could be common in Mandarin Chinese. Curiously, there were few participants in the present study who used traditional alternative color terms. For example, the orange term 橘 jú (
N = 41, 100%) significantly prevailed over another orange term 橙 chéng (
N = 2), although 橙 chéng was reported to be an orange BCT earlier (
Lu, 1997). The foreign loan word 咖啡 kāfēi (
N = 41, 100%) prevailed over traditional brown terms 棕 zōng (
N = 10) and 褐 hé (
N = 2), that were considered promising as BCTs (e.g.,
Lu, 1997; Lin et al., 2001). We speculate that generational or regional differences or both could be one of the causes to explain such phenomena. Perhaps to the younger residents in internationalized area (Taipei city) like our participants, color terms like 咖啡 (kāfēi) are just trendy colloquial expression with plain-spoken, easily-recalled, and foreign-cultural features. They might have spontaneously preferred using it even though they were taught many classic choices of synonyms or hypernyms referring to brown, repeatedly in school textbooks.