Exploration of the Usage of Color Terms by Color-blind Participants in Online Discussion Platforms Ella Rabinovich1Boaz Carmeli12

2025-05-06 0 0 1.21MB 13 页 10玖币

侵权投诉

Exploration of the Usage of Color Terms by Color-blind Participants in

Online Discussion Platforms

Ella Rabinovich∗1Boaz Carmeli∗1,2

1IBM Research

2Technion – 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 au-

thors found general development patterns similar to

those by their sighted agemates. Representation of

colors in blind and color-blind individuals was stud-

ied in a controlled color-similarity experiment with

37 participants – 15 red-green color-blind, among

others (Shepard and Cooper,1992). The partici-

pants were asked to rank the degree of similarity

between colors, when presented with names-only,

visual colors only, and names+color stimuli. While

signiﬁcant differences in the similarity judgments

were found for the color-only setting, when color-

deﬁcient participants were presented with names

along with the colors, their rankings became closer

to those by normal-sighted people. This suggests

that linguistic exposure plays a considerable role

in shaping our perception of color representation.

Multiple works have studied the language of visu-

ally impaired and blind children at various stages of

language development, suggesting evidence for dif-

ﬁculties in just those areas of language acquisition

arXiv:2210.11905v2 [cs.CL] 30 Oct 2022

where visual information can provide input about

the world, stimulating hypotheses about pertinent

aspects of the linguistic system (Andersen et al.,

1984;Pérez-Pereira and Conti-Ramsden,2013).

The puzzling question on the role of sensory vs.

linguistics input in shaping our color perception

remains therefore sound. In this work, we make a

step forward towards better understanding of the

conceptual perception of the red and green colors

in red-green color-blind individuals, as mirrored in

their spontaneous linguistic production.

We perform a ﬁrst (to the best of our knowledge)

large-scale computational study on the usage of

the "red" and "green" color terms in (self-reported)

population with deutan and protan visual impair-

ment. Using a novel dataset of linguistic produc-

tions by color-blind (CB) individuals, we show that

they use the "red" and "green" color terms in less

predictable contexts, and in linguistic environments

evoking mental image to a lower extent, when com-

pared to normal-sighted (NS) authors.

The contribution of this study is, therefore,

twofold: First, we release a large, diverse, and

carefully curated dataset of linguistic productions

by red-green CB authors, accompanied by a cor-

pus of utterances by NS individuals, aligned on

various linguistic properties. Second, we show pre-

liminary evidence for subtle, yet reliably detected,

divergences in the usage of "red" and "green" by

CB speakers, compared to their NS counterparts.

We make the dataset and our code available for

facilitating future research in this ﬁeld.1

2 Datasets

We collected datasets used in this work from Reddit

– an online community-driven platform consisting

of numerous forums for news aggregation, content

rating, and discussions. As of 2021, it had over

430 million monthly active users, positioning it as

the sixth most popular social site in the US. Con-

tent entries are organized by areas of interest called

subreddits, ranging from main forums that receive

extensive attention to smaller ones that foster dis-

cussion on niche areas.

2.1 Collection of Posts by CB Users

Multiple subreddits allow their contributors to spec-

ify a ﬂair – a metadata attribute adding context to

Code is available at

https://github.com/IBM/

colorblind-language; complying with Reddit’s terms

of use, we provide a full pipeline for re-producing the dataset

(extraction and ﬁltering), rather than the data itself.

the speciﬁc subreddit, such as country of origin,

political association, occupation, age, etc. We col-

lected the set of color-blind Reddit authors from

r/colorblind

, considering only those self-

reported as having one of the red-green color blind-

ness types we study in this work: deuteranopia,

deuteranomaly,protanopia, and protanomaly. This

procedure resulted in

2,523

authors in total. Using

the collected list of user IDs, we were further able

to retrieve their entire digital footprint from Reddit,

spanning years 2005 through 2021.

Manual inspection of utterances produced by

the color-blind Reddit users reveals that CB au-

thors occasionally discuss various aspects related

to the impairment, as in "this game’s color-scheme

is not a good ﬁt for colorblind, I cannot tell red

from green". Aiming at the analysis of deﬁciency-

agnostic linguistic productions, we apply strict ﬁl-

ters on user utterances, by excluding (1) sentences

originating from a manually collected list of sub-

reddits potentially related to the color blindness

phenomenon, and (2) sentences containing words

possibly indicative of the CB impairment, such

as "color", "colorblind", "vision", their inﬂections

and spelling alternatives (e.g., "colour"), to prevent

potential biases stemming from deﬁciency-related

discussions. The full list of excluded subreddits

can be found in Appendix A.1.

2.2 Collection of Posts by NS Users

The comparative nature of our analysis requires

a collection of utterances produced by normal-

sighted Reddit authors. Assuming the relatively

low ratio of

∼8%

of people with the CB deﬁciency

in the population (Wong,2011), we sampled a large

set of posts and comments from the general popula-

tion of Reddit authors, excluding the (self-reported)

set of CB users. We believe that this approach

largely targets the language of NS authors due to

their large numbers and extensive diversity.

Usage patterns of color terms in linguistic pro-

ductions can be affected by several dimensions: de-

mographic factors (gender, age), language modality

(spoken vs. written), linguistic register (formal vs.

informal), topical preferences, etc. Multiple works

have shown that there exist detectable differences

in the language of male and female speakers, and

that topical tendencies shape both the frequency

and contextual environment of word usage. There-

fore, we strived to create a control set of NS pro-

ductions that would be aligned with CB language

across these dimensions. While achieving a perfect

alignment is impractical, we controlled for two ma-

jor dimensions – gender and topic – while sampling

linguistic productions by NS authors.

Balancing Posts by Author Gender

Color

blindness affects approximately 1 in 12 men (

and 1 in 200 women (

0.5

%) in the world (Wong,

2011). Because most commons roots of color blind-

ness are genetic, passed along the X-chromosome,

people with XY chromosomes (most men) only

need one defective chromosome (X) to have the

deﬁciency (Wong,2011). Roughly speaking, the

phenomenon is

times more frequent in men than

in women. The imbalanced

ratio of male (M) to

female (F) Reddit authors

imposes an additional

prior distribution to the ratio of men vs. women in

the color-blind population of Reddit, increasing the

estimated frequency of color-blind male authors to

times higher than that of female in our data.

A large body of research has shown that the

language of female authors differs from that of

their male counterparts, exhibiting both topical and

stylistic divergences (Lakoff,1973;Holmes,1984;

Labov,1990), to the extent that texts written by the

two genders are separable automatically (Koppel

et al.,2002;Argamon et al.,2003;Rabinovich et al.,

2017). Gender-linked differences in human color

lexicon, preferences, and perception have been re-

ported in the literature (Arthur et al.,2007;Eckert

and McConnell-Ginet,2013), suggestive of their

effect on both the frequency and contextual linguis-

tic environments of color terms. A valid control

set of authors should, therefore, maintain the same

M:F author ratio as in the CB set, i.e., 32:1.

Recently, Rabinovich et al. (2020) released a

large dataset of posts and comments collected from

the Reddit discussion platform, where each sen-

tence is annotated by the (self-reported) binary au-

thor gender. We exploit this dataset by making use

of utterances by

13,630

male users, and by (ran-

domly downsampled)

425

female users, preserving

the

32:1

M:F author ratio and resulting in the total

of 14,055 authors4and over 45M posts.

Balancing Posts by Topical Threads

Usage pat-

terns of words, and in particular, color terms, are

2According to statistics in shorturl.at/doH02.

The collection of color-blind authors does not contain

gender markers; therefore, applying the general Reddit prior

to our set of CB authors is a plausible choice.

Authors with self-reported gender that also indicated their

color blindness defect, were excluded from this set.

likely to be affected by their contextual environ-

ment. As an example, using color terms in a topi-

cal thread (subreddit) related to interior design will

differ from that of gaming, health, or world news.

Aiming at similar topical distribution in both CB

and NS sets, we balance the distribution of sen-

tences in various subreddits across the two popula-

tions, by (1) splitting the data at the sentence-level,

(2) using the CB subreddit distribution as the an-

chor, and (3) performing stratiﬁed sampling of NS

data to maintain the same relative topical ratios.

Speciﬁcally, let

(r1, r2, r3, ..., rn)

be the rela-

tive ratios of the amount of sentences spanning

subreddits in the CB dataset, where

Pri=1

; the

set of NS sentences is then randomly downsampled

in a manner preserving the topical distribution

Although the absolute number of sentences differs

signiﬁcantly in the two datasets, the relative ratio

of each topical thread is roughly preserved.

2.3 Color Terms used in this Study

We address our research questions by performing

contrastive analysis of the usage patterns of "red"

and "green", as well as additional eight color terms

exceeding the total count of

1000

in our CB dataset:

"black", "white", "blue", "brown", "gr[ae]y", "yel-

low", "pink" and "purple".

This resulted in the to-

tal number of over

K and

380

K sentences, each

including at least one of the ten color terms, for the

CB and NS populations, respectively. Differences

(if they exist) are anticipated to be linked to the

CB-deﬁciency, therefore evident in the usage of

"red" and "green" terms, but not the others.

2.4 Fixed Expressions and Named Entities

Color terms are often used in ﬁxed linguistic expres-

sions – groups of words used together to express

a particular idea or concept that is more speciﬁc

than the literal combination of individual words.

Among such expressions are "black music", "red

army", "green energy", etc. Both the production

and comprehension of such expressions is unlikely

to evoke a visual image of color in one’s mind,

hence processing of these terms does not rely on

the ability to visually distinguish between colors.

Therefore, we excluded expressions with salient

non-compositional nature from this work.

A subset of expressions exceeding the

0.5

% rel-

ative frequency among the full set of <color-term

NOUN> adjective phrases considered in this work

5With an exception of "purple" that has 943 occurrences.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

10 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载

摘要：

ExplorationoftheUsageofColorTermsbyColor-blindParticipantsinOnlineDiscussionPlatformsEllaRabinovich1BoazCarmeli1;21IBMResearch2TechnionIsraelInstituteofTechnologyella.rabinovich1@ibm.comboazc@il.ibm.comAbstractProminentquestionsabouttheroleofsensoryvs.linguisticinputinthewayweacquireanduselanguag...

展开>> 收起<<

Exploration of the Usage of Color Terms by Color-blind Participants in Online Discussion Platforms Ella Rabinovich1Boaz Carmeli12.pdf

共13页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Exploration of the Usage of Color Terms by Color-blind Participants in Online Discussion Platforms Ella Rabinovich1Boaz Carmeli12

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: