A Study to Investigate the Existence of Monolexemic Colour Terms in Dravidian Languages: A Visual Psychophysics Approach

Colour naming remains problematic in cognitive science and linguistics, especially since they exhibit structural regularities across cultures. The universality of colour terms by Berlin and Kay shows Eleven colour prototypes in typological patterns of fundamental colour words in English and other languages. Major Dravidian languages were not included in his pioneering study later Kapp in 2004 aimed to investigate the fundamental colour concepts used in South Dravidian tribal languages. We sought to evaluate the monolexemic colour theory and the presence of these postulated colour words in Dravidian widely spoken languages, as well as map them from a vision sciences viewpoint in the present paper. By recruiting n = 40 individuals from four L1 mother tongue languages, visual psychophysical methods were employed in the investigation. The experiment examined the semantic fluency task, colour naming task, and stoop task. The monolexemic colour words hypothesis developed for the English language is found to vary in major Dravidian languages, with the bulk of colour terms limited to seven to eight colours. Surprisingly, several colour names had any commonality throughout the Dravidian languages.