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A developmental study of the acquisition of Russian colour terms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 1998

IAN R. L. DAVIES ,
GREVILLE G. CORBETT ,
HARRY McGURK  and
CATRIONA MacDERMID
IAN R. L. DAVIES
Affiliation:
University of Surrey
GREVILLE G. CORBETT
Affiliation:
University of Surrey
HARRY McGURK
Affiliation:
University of Surrey Now at The Australian Family Research Unit, Melbourne.
CATRIONA MacDERMID
Affiliation:
University of Surrey
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Abstract

We report a study of the acquisition of colour terms by Russian children which had two main aims: first, to test Berlin & Kay's (1969) theory of colour universals using acquisition order as a measure of basicness; and secondly, to see if the two blue terms of Russian are genuinely basic. Two hundred children aged from three to six-years-old were tested on three colour-tasks – colour term listing, colour term production and colour term comprehension. To a reasonable approximation, the order of colour term acquisition was in accord with Berlin & Kay's theory, but the data are also consistent with the weaker claim that primary terms tend to be learned before derived terms. On balance the data were consistent with Russian exceptionally, having an extra term for the blue region. But, the two blue terms – goluboj ‘light blue’ and sinij ‘dark blue’ – were confused more often than other pairs of terms even by the five- to six-year-old sample.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , June 1998 , pp. 395 - 417
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This work was supported by the ESRC, grant numbers: R 000 23 1958 and R 000 23 3978. This support is gratefully acknowledged. We are also indebted to our Russian colleague Svetlana Stepanskaja for collecting the data. We are grateful for the comments of the reviewers, particularly for the suggestion of using Guttman scaling on the data.