Figure 2.

Simulating the cultural transmission of colour term systems. (a) The array of colours used in the world colour survey (WCS). Members of 110 non-industrial societies reported the terms that their languages used to label these colours [28–30]). (b) Examples of colour-term systems produced by simulating cultural transmission in the laboratory. Each column shows one chain of systems produced by participants learning novel colour terms from examples sampled from the system of labels assigned to colours by the previous participant. Transmission proceeds down the column, and different columns show chains for systems with two, three, four, five and six terms. The colour chips are arranged in the same order as in (a), so the position of a chip in the arrays corresponds to its colour. The colours signify which chips were labelled with the same colour word, and do not directly correspond to the colours denoted by the words (light blue is used to indicate a minority term, used for less than 5% of all chips). The first system in each column is a randomly generated initial partition. The last system in the first column is the Dani language [31], for which only aggregate data using a subset of the WCS array are available (the grey bars correspond to unlabelled chips). The last five systems in the remaining columns are data from individual speakers of the closest matching WCS language (determined by averaging variation of information (VI) values across iterations 4–13 of each chain).