Color Research and Application, Vol.44, No.5, 749-761, 2019
Colour-naming behavior among bilingual Malayalam-English speakers: Evidence from English narrative discourse
Through an unconstrained colour-naming task, researchers have found that bilinguals possess greater colour vocabulary knowledge than monolinguals. In the current study, we explore the colour-naming behavior of bilinguals in spontaneous speech scenarios. The native language of these bilinguals holds complex colour labels for most of the colours, for which the second language holds only basic colour terms. For this purpose, a story narration task was developed where eight stories were designed with elementary and mixed colour conditions. Two groups of participants took part in the study: (a) 44 monolingual speakers and (b) 32 Malayalam-English bilinguals. Qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed that there were clear colour label differences between the basic colour terms in English and Malayalam and those labeled by bilingual speakers. Bilingual speakers use translation equivalents of Malayalam colour terms for English colours.
Keywords:Basic colour terms in Malayalam;English-Malayalam bilingual speakers;Indian language;narrative discourse