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

Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6673 - 6685 December 7-11, 2022 ©2022 Association for Computational Linguistics Exploration of the Usage of Color Terms by Color-blind Participants in Online Discussion Platforms Ella Rabinovich∗ 1 Boaz Carmeli∗ 1,2 1 IBM Research 2 Technion – Israel Institute of Technology ella.rabinovich1@ibm.com boazc@il.ibm.com 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 under- standing of the conceptual perception of col- ors by color-blind individuals, as reflected in their spontaneous linguistic productions. Us- ing a novel and carefully curated dataset, we show that red-green color-blind speakers use the "red" and "green" color terms in less pre- dictable contexts, and in linguistic environ- ments evoking mental image to a lower extent, when compared to their normal-sighted coun- terparts. These findings shed some new and interesting light on the role of sensory experi- ence on our linguistic system. 1 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 experi- ence of color has long raised intriguing questions concerning grounded color semantics – quantify- ing the associations between words and perceptual representations – to philosophers, scientists, and psycholinguists (Chuang et al., 2008; Heer and Stone, 2012). McMahan and Stone (2015) have shown that the subjective quality of color experi- ence varies between individuals. A body of work in color semantics have indicated that color lexicaliza- tion and usage patterns can be significantly affected by extra-linguistic factors, such as culture, physi- cal environment (Athanasopoulos, 2011; Josserand et al., 2021), and the native language of a speaker (Sarantakis, 2014; Matusevych et al., 2018). How do colors appear to color-blind individu- als? Does the imperfect perceptual experience of ∗The authors contributed equally to this work. red and green in people with red-green visual de- ficiency (deuteranopia) shape their color-related linguistic production? Embodied cognition theory poses that the entirety of our sensory experience – activities that help us develop a better understand- ing of word semantics by using our five senses – shapes our conceptual knowledge (Barsalou et al., 2008; Foglia and Wilson, 2013). 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 con- tribute to our conceptual knowledge and processing, which, in turn, is reflected in our language. Related Work Prior work on the effect of color- blindness on language production is relatively sparse. Landau and Gleitman (2009) studied the language of blind children, focusing (among oth- ers) on the achievements of three blind children’s in the area of syntax and word learning. The …

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