Categorisation of Colour Terms Using New Validation Tools: A Case Study and Implications

Abstract

This article elaborates on the results of a field experiment conducted among speakers of the Chakali language, spoken in northern Ghana. In the original study, the Color-aid Corporation Chart was used to perform the focal task in which consultants were asked to point at a single colour tile on the chart. However, data from the focal task could not be analysed since the Color-aid tiles had not yet been converted into numerical values set forth by the Commission internationale de l’éclairage (CIE). In this study, the full set of 314 Color-aid tiles were measured for chromaticity and converted into the CIE values at the Daylight Laboratory of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. This article presents the conversion methodology and makes the results of the measurements, which are available in the Online Appendix. We argue that some visual-perception terms cannot be reliably ascribed to colour categories established by the Color-aid Corporation. This suggests that the ideophonic expressions in the dataset do not denote ‘colours’, as categorised in the Color-aid system, as it was impossible to average the consultants’ data into a CIE chromaticity diagram, illustrate the phenomena on the Natural Colour System (NCS) Circle and Triangle diagrams, and conduct a statistical analysis. One of the implications of this study is that a line between a visual-perception term and a colour term could be systematically established using a method with predefined categorical thresholds.