Faculty Sponsor: Maryam Gooyabadi
Abstract: Color is a universal concept existing in every language. While each language has its own unique characteristics, there has been found a shared pattern existing across different language groups. Studying the similarities and differences in color naming between languages could give us a clear view of some underlying shared patterns in linguistics and even a better understanding of how people think. The interesting thing about color naming is that people coming from different language backgrounds all over the world could fall into the same clusters based on their characteristics of color naming. The primary purpose of this study is to explore if some demographic features, like climate, will have a crucial influence on big clusters. To examine the relationships between those, contingency tables and multinomial regressions are widely used to see whether anything unexpected happens. The results state that factors including climate types, people’s occupation, latitude, and longitude are important in determining memberships in some clusters. However, every factor seems only to have a weak impact on cluster determination, which means that further study is needed to reveal the mysterious mechanism of color naming.
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