Age at onset of blindness and the development of the semantics of color names

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Abstract

Sixteen college students who had been born totally blind, 16 who had been blinded totally at approximately 15 years of age, and 16 who had normal vision were asked to judge the similarities between color names. These judgments were submitted to the multidimensional scaling program INDSCAL. Like the sighted and the adventitiously blind, the congenitally blind yielded a 2-dimensional space in which the color terms formed a circle with the color names ordered in approximately the spectral sequence, red, orange, gold, yellow, green, turquoise, blue, purple, and violet, around the circumference. Contrary to previous research, the present findings suggest that knowledge of color relations can develop in the absence of first-hand experience with color perception.

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The research was supported by Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration Research Service Award No. 1 F32 MH05453-01 from the National Institute of Mental Health.

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