Children’s color vocabulary

The purpose of this study was to examine the use of color terms by male and female elementary school children. Thirty-six children were asked to label colors. A significant difference was found between younger females and older females, tentatively indicating a developmental trend that may explain the differences in color term production between adult females and adult males. No significant differences were found between males and females, or between younger males and older males. Although there are seven and one half million different shades of color (Optical Society of America, Committee on Colorimetry, 1953), and four thousand words in English to describe them (Malez and Paul, 1930), few people make that many color distinctions. In fact, wrote Brown (1958, p. 211), &dquo;In American English there are only about eight commonly used color terms. Evidently we categorize colors.&dquo; The eight he named were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, and brown. Berlin and Kay (1969) surveyed languages other than English and concluded that the colors black, white, and grey should be added to this list. The number of categories used is in dispute, however. Lakoff (1975) felt that wome