Communication about color over the life span

Color communication is more than a naming game where the informant names each color: the color terms must also be understood by the listener. Here, we studied how participants’ productive and receptive vocabularies affect communication about color over the life span. Human participants, 3–72 years old, played a color communication game. As “senders”, participants named 15 or 30 color samples presented singly. Then, as “receiv­ers”, they selected, from the full palette of colors, the sample that corresponded to color term “messages,” which were either their own color terms (self-communication) or another participant’s color terms (interpersonal communication). The number of color terms in participants’ vocabularies, their fraction correct performance for self-communication, and their fraction correct for interpersonal communication, all matured continuously until at least age 21, and were highly correlated with each other. Analysis by simulation showed that performance for self-communication was determined by the number of color terms the participant provided in the color-naming phase of the experiment (color term produc­tion), with some forgetting of how they had previously named the samples. By contrast, simulation predicted no association between participant age and performance on the interpersonal communication task. Contrary to prediction, interpersonal communication improved throughout the age range. Further simulations showed that performance for inter­personal communication was independently controlled by life-long improvement in participants’ ability to understand terms provided by others (color term comprehension). Therefore, color term production and color term comprehension are distinct abilities which mature independently across the life span.