Conjoined Ordering of Color Terms by Children and Adults

Preferences for ordering conjoined color terms in English were examined for twenty first-graders and twenty-one adults. On each trial the subjects were asked to name the two colors included in a pair of intertwined shoelaces. For children the results showed that ordering preferences were determined primarily by differences in brightness rather than hue or saturation, with relatively dark colors ordered before relatively light colors. The hue dimension showed more importance for adults, with red, pink, and purple typically occurring in first position. A small number of conjoined color pairs exhibited a significant ordering preference, with most of these pairs including white in second position. The strength of the ordering effect is related to the perceived level of contrast between the two colors, with more highly contrastive pairs being more likely to exhibit a fixed ordering. Additional results showed that ordering preferences were unrelated to individual color preferences, that adult females showed stronger ordering tendencies than adult males, and that the ordering exhibited by both male and female children correlated better with the ordering of adult females than with the ordering of adult males.