Much research suggests that there exist universal colour names. Investigations involving paint and paper media have revealed co-incidence of especially salient names and their concomitant sensations, within and between cultures. These names have been called Basic Colour Terms (BCfs), and their prototypical sensations focal colours (or foci). The highest levelof colour name development within cultures includes eleven BCfs. A literature review revealed certain omissions in the colour naming work. Firstly was a lack of usage of CRT-baseddisplay of colours. This was considered an important omission given the implicit, but largely untested assumption that CRT and surface media may be equivalent. A second omission identified was a lack of detailed quantification of realistic naming behaviour. Two CRT-based experiments were then devised to quantify colour naming, one involving unconstrained naming of colours, one involving selection of which colours were exemplars of (thirteen) pre-generated colour names. These experiments revealed certain regularities in naming within a (perceptually uniform) colour space. Thus a naming space and its underlying structure was obtained. Naming space was found to be a composite of they way membership of (BCf) categories was expressed, and an underlying set of five fundamental colour sensations. Evidencewas then forthcoming that this structure might be modelable. The quantified data obtained was then used to investigate the search-efficacy of easy to name colours. Such easy to name palettes were generated, based on the data obtained, and compared with colorimetrically matched, and highly discriminable palettes. It was found that easy to name as a colour palette variable was meaningful, and capable of adjusting user performance, despite evidence that individuals may possess relatively stable, idiosyncratic colour vocabularies. That CRT work has generality was verified by comparison of foci obtained from a series of studies involving different media. Although some differences were evident, these followed clear patterns which were not inconsistent with universal colour naming. This thesis suggests that there exist complex aspects of colour naming behaviour which are nevertheless understandable, and largely predictable. Such theoretical data should allow for improvements in certain human-interactions, where tasks involve naming colours.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:310421 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Guest, Steven John |
| Publisher | University of Portsmouth |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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