The colour lexicon of the Serbian language - a study of dark blue and dark red colour categories Part 2: Categorical facilitation with Serbian colour terms

Abstract

Part 1 of this study (Jakovljev & Zdravkovic, 2018) isolated two frequent and salient non- BCTs in the Serbian language: teget ?dark blue? and bordo ?dark red?, that segregate the blue and the red part of the colour space respectively. Now we conducted two experiments to additionally test the cognitive salience of these terms, investigating whether they can produce the category effects in a colour discrimination task. We demonstrated within? and between-participants agreement about the placement of the boundary in the blue and the red part of the colour space, additionally showing that Serbian speakers have distinctive representations of these categories. Analysis of RT in the discrimination task showed category effects ? participants were faster when discriminating colour pairs that belong to different linguistic categories than the pairs from the same category. These results for the first time demonstrated category effect in the Serbian language as well as the category effect in speeded discrimination of the red part of the colour space for any language. They also support views that category effect is linked to higher cognitive processes; hence it can be language specific.