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The evolution of color naming reflects pressure for efficiency: Evidence from the recent past

View ORCID ProfileNoga Zaslavsky, Karee Garvin, Charles Kemp, Naftali Tishby, Terry Regier
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.11.03.467047
Noga Zaslavsky
1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Brains Minds and Machines, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA 02139, USA
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  • For correspondence: nogazs@mit.edu
Karee Garvin
2Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
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Charles Kemp
3School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
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Naftali Tishby
4Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences and Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 9190401, Israel
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Terry Regier
2Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
5Cognitive Science Program, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
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Abstract

It has been proposed that semantic systems evolve under pressure for efficiency. This hypothesis has so far been supported largely indirectly, by synchronic cross-language comparison, rather than directly by diachronic data. Here, we directly test this hypothesis in the domain of color naming, by analyzing recent diachronic data from Nafaanra, a language of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and comparing it with quantitative predictions derived from the mathematical theory of efficient data compression. We show that color naming in Nafaanra has changed over the past four decades while remaining near-optimally efficient, and that this outcome would be unlikely under a random drift process that maintains structured color categories without pressure for efficiency. To our knowledge, this finding provides the first direct evidence that color naming evolves under pressure for efficiency, supporting the hypothesis that efficiency shapes the evolution of the lexicon.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted February 14, 2022.
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The evolution of color naming reflects pressure for efficiency: Evidence from the recent past
Noga Zaslavsky, Karee Garvin, Charles Kemp, Naftali Tishby, Terry Regier
bioRxiv 2021.11.03.467047; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.11.03.467047
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The evolution of color naming reflects pressure for efficiency: Evidence from the recent past
Noga Zaslavsky, Karee Garvin, Charles Kemp, Naftali Tishby, Terry Regier
bioRxiv 2021.11.03.467047; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.11.03.467047

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