This paper describes an experiment designed to test the hypothesis that women have larger colour vocabularies than men. The results indicate that they do. The results also indicate that, in at least one social class, younger men have larger colour vocabularies than do older men. No such difference exists for women. However, a group of Catholic nuns did score lower than the rest of the women but still higher than the men.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Barron, N. ( 1971). Sex-typed language: the production of grammatical cases . Acta Sociologica, 14, 24-42.
2.
Dubois, P.H. ( 1939). The sex difference on the color-naming test. Amer. J. Psychol., 52, 380.
3.
Haas, M. ( 1944). Men's and women's speech in Koasati. Language, 20, 142-9.
4.
Jespersen, O. ( 1922). Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin (New York) , chap. 13.
5.
Lakoff, R. ( 1975). Language and Woman's Place (New York).
6.
Ligon, E.M. ( 1932). A genetic study of color naming and word reading . Amer. J. Psychol., 44, 103-22.
7.
Siegel, S. ( 1956). Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (New York).
8.
Woodworth, R.S. and Wells, F.L. ( 1911). Association tests. Psychological Monographs , 57, 1-80.
