Natural color categories are convex sets

Abstract

The paper presents a statistical evaluation of the typological data about color naming systems across the languages of the world that have been obtained by the World Color Survey. In a first step, we discuss a principal component analysis of the categorization data that led to a small set of easily interpretable features dominant in color categorization. These features were used for a dimensionality reduction of the categorization data. Using the thus preprocessed categorization data, we proceed to show that available typological data support the hypothesis by Peter G¨ardenfors that the extension of color category are convex sets in the CIELab space in all languages of the world.