Food Color Memory and Names – A Linguistic Vantage

We name colors of foods with great ease. This paper presents a series of experiments carried out with English speakers. The process of naming food colors is conventionalized through our cultures and our biological dictates. People identify food colors through words that are again highly constrained. Embodiment of experience and perception deals with these constraints to make color term use a cognitively economical mechanism, keeping numbers of concepts in mind through categorial conceptualization in long term memory. The parallel process that puts together our linguistic and visual information, allows the individual to map a correspondence between the two frames. The result of this mapping is a “cognitive color” in long term color memory. This paper presents an experiment in triggering long term memory and the response results. The objective was to verify whether individuals’ cognitive color of well known foods, both raw and cooked, that they had just identified with Natural Color System (NCS) color samples, would be predominantly a primary basic color term, a secondary basic color term, or a complete descriptive utterance. The name used to communicate a desired signification is accessed through the judgement of similarity and difference with a point of reference. In this case, the food color vantage represents the cognitive color remembered.