Fig. 3.

Communication efficiency of color naming, across languages and among color chips. (A) Communication efficiency for each language of the WCS (open symbols), Tsimane’ (black symbols), Bolivian-Spanish (dark gray symbols), and English (light gray symbols), as a function of number of unique color words used by the population of participants tested in each language. The two data sets collected in Tsimane’, Bolivian-Spanish, and Tsimane’ show that variability in experimental methods have little impact on assessments of communicative efficiency of color naming, licensing the use of the WCS data for further analysis. Circles show data from experiments in which participants were constrained to use a fixed vocabulary of basic color terms; squares show data where participants were free to use any term. Number of participants stated as (N=fixed choice, free choice). Communicative efficiency for each language was computed using Eq. 2. (B) Color chips rank-ordered by their average surprisal (computed using Eq. 1) for Tsimane' and Bolivian-Spanish (pattern for English overlaps Spanish, omitted for clarity). SI Appendix, Table S5 provides the chip identity in rank order. The asterisks represent focal colors determined as described in Fig. 2. The sequences of colors in each population are highly correlated (Spearman rank correlation between Bolivian-Spanish and English, ρ = 0.87; between Bolivian-Spanish and Tsimane', ρ = 0.51; and between English and Tsimane', ρ = 0.53).