Exploration of the Usage of Color Terms by Color-blind Participants in Online Discussion Platforms (2022)

Abstract: Prominent questions about the role of sensory vs. linguistic input in the way we acquire and use language have been extensively studied in the psycholinguistic literature. However, the relative effect of various factors in a person’s overall experience on their linguistic system remains unclear. We study this question by making a step forward towards a better understanding of the conceptual perception of colors by color-blind individuals, as reflected in their spontaneous linguistic productions. Using a novel and carefully curated dataset, we show that red-green color-blind speakers use the “red” and “green” color terms in less predictable contexts, and in linguistic environments evoking mental image to a lower extent, when compared to their normal-sighted counterparts. These findings shed some new and interesting light on the role of sensory experience on our linguistic system.

## introduction colors play an exceptionally prominent role in our lives. simple and vivid, and yet so difficult to describe or reduce to linguistic terms, our experience of color has long raised intriguing questions concerning grounded color semantics -quantifying the associations between words and perceptual representations -to philosophers, scientists, and psycholinguists @xcite . @xcite have shown that the subjective quality of color experience varies between individuals. a body of work in color semantics have indicated that color lexicalization and usage patterns can be significantly affected by extra-linguistic factors, such as culture, physical environment @xcite , and the native language of a speaker @xcite . how do colors appear to color-blind individuals? does the imperfect perceptual experience of * the authors contributed equally to this work. red and green in people with red-green visual deficiency (deuteranopia) shape their color-related linguistic production? embodied cognition theory poses that the entirety of our sensory experienceactivities that help us develop a better understanding of word semantics by using our five sensesshapes our conceptual knowledge @xcite . as an example, reading the word "cat" is likely to elicit sensory experiences we have with cats, such as their sound and how they look. embodied cognition theory thus assumes that all our sensory experiences contribute to our conceptual knowledge and processing, which, in turn, is reflected in our language. related work prior work on the effect of colorblindness on language production is relatively sparse. @xcite studied the language of blind children, focusing (among others) on the achievements of three blind children's in the area of syntax and word learning. the authors found general development patterns similar to those by their sighted agemates. representation of colors in blind and color-blind individuals was studied in a controlled color-similarity experiment with 37 participants -15 red-green color-blind, among others @xcite . the participants were asked to rank the degree of similarity between colors, when presented with names-only, visual colors only, and names+color stimuli. while significant differences in the similarity judgments were found for the color-only setting, when colordeficient participants were presented with names along with the colors, their rankings became closer to those by normal-sighted people. this suggests that linguistic exposure plays a considerable role in shaping our perception of color representation. multiple works have studied the language of visually impaired and blind children at various stages of language development, suggesting evidence for difficulties in just those areas of language acquisition where visual information can provide input about the world, stimulating hypotheses about pertinent aspects of the linguistic system @xcite . the puzzling question on the role of sensory vs. linguistics input in shaping our color perception remains therefore sound. in this work, we make a step forward towards better understanding of the conceptual perception of the red and green colors in red-green color-blind individuals, as mirrored in their spontaneous linguistic production. we perform a first (to the best of our knowledge) large-scale computational study on the usage of the "red" and "green" color terms in (self-reported) population with deutan and protan visual impairment. using a novel dataset of linguistic productions by color-blind (cb) individuals, we show that they use the "red" and "green" color terms in less predictable contexts, and in linguistic environments evoking mental image to a lower extent, when compared to normal-sighted (ns) authors. the contribution of this study is, therefore, twofold: first, we release a large, diverse, and carefully curated dataset of linguistic productions by red-green cb authors, accompanied by a corpus of utterances by ns individuals, aligned on various linguistic properties. second, we show preliminary evidence for subtle, yet reliably detected, divergences in the usage of "red" and "green" by cb speakers, compared to their ns counterparts. we make the dataset and our code available for facilitating future research in this field. foot_0 ## datasets we collected datasets used in this work from reddit -an online community-driven platform consisting of numerous forums for news aggregation, content rating, and discussions. as of 2021, it had over 430 million monthly active users, positioning it as the sixth most popular social site in the us. content entries are organized by areas of interest called subreddits, ranging from main forums that receive extensive attention to smaller ones that foster discussion on niche areas. ## research questions the two sub-corpora represent a suitable testbed for investigating questions about the unique linguistic phenomena characteristic of red-green cb authors, compared to the ns population of reddit users. here, we elaborate on the research questions addressed in this study. rq1 how does the frequency of color terms in linguistic productions of cb users compare to that of ns speakers? we refer to (1) the frequency of color terms in the language, and (2) the relative frequency ratio of individual color terms -in particular, "red" and "green" -within the entire set of the ten color terms considered in this work. rq2 red-green color blindness affects the ability to generate a clear (and distinguishable) mental image of these two colors in the mind of a speaker, giving rise to the hypothesis that cb authors would be more hesitant when using these two color terms in linguistic environments evoking a visual image in one's mind. such linguistic environments can be commonly found in topical threads involving visual experience, such as r/gaming, r/nature or r/fashion. focusing on adjective phrases with color-terms -attributive (e.g., "red/adj shirt/noun") or predicative (e.g., "this shirt/noun is red/adj") -we test this hypothesis by searching for detectable differences in the psycholinguistic property of the modified nouns' imageability -a measure of how easily a physical object, word, or environment evokes a clear mental image in the mind of a person observing it @xcite . a common way to study perceptual aspects related to language in psycholinguistic literature distinguishes between nine major psycholinguistic dimensions, including imageability. scott et al. (2019) released a set of 5, 500 english words manually ranked along the nine dimensions on the 1-7 scale, facilitating much research in psycholinguistics and related fields @xcite @xcite ). as a concrete example, the word "piano" has a ranking of 6.88 in the imageability dimension, while "request" was only assigned the score of 2.50. we use the rankings by @xcite to investigate if detectable differences can be found in the imageability properties of nouns modified by the "red" and "green" color terms, as employed by red-green cb vs. ns authors. ## discussion we view the main contribution of this study in its large-scale data-driven empirical evidence for theoretically-motivated hypotheses on the effect of various sensory experiences on language learning and linguistic production. human language production is a complex cognitive skill, where most psychological models agree on three stages: conceptualization, formulation and articulation. conceptualization is considered to be the phase of selection and preparation of pre-linguistic information, relying also on extra-linguistic knowledge -among others, visual perception based on our sensory experience. llms, however large and complex, (presumably) lack this inherently-human cognitive skill, but rather operationalize linguistic production by stochastically reproducing language constructions they were exposed to, and generalizing to additional linguistically plausible patterns. focusing on the effect of multi-modal input on human language production, we ask if bridging this gap is required for contemporary llms in order to generate fully naturalistic, human-like language. we believe that this work sheds new and interesting light on one of the core questions in language acquisition, and the ability of machines to achieve human-like linguistic competence. ## conclusions we present a comparative analysis of the usage of "red" and "green" color terms in linguistic productions of red-green cb individuals and their ns counterparts. we show that color-blind speakers use these terms in less predictable contexts, and in linguistic environments evoking mental image to a lower extent. we believe that this study, along with the released dataset, helps better understanding of the effect of sensory experience on our language, and facilitates future research in this field.