Chromatic stimuli across a boundary of basic colour categories (BCCs; e.g. blue and green) are discriminated faster than colorimetrically equidistant colours within a given category. Russian has two BCCs for blue, sinij 'dark blue' and goluboj 'light blue'. These language-specific BCCs were reported to enable native Russian speakers to discriminate cross-boundary dark and light blues faster than English speakers (Winawer et al., 2007, PNAS, 4, 7780-7785). We re-evaluated this finding in two experiments that employed identical tasks as in the cited study. In Experiment 1, Russian and English speakers categorised colours as sinij/goluboj or dark blue/light blue respectively; this was followed by a colour discrimination task. In Experiment 2, Russian speakers initially performed the discrimination task on sinij/goluboj and goluboj/zelënyj 'green' sets. They then categorised these colours in three frequency contexts with each stimulus presented: (i) an equal number of times (unbiased); more frequent (ii) either sinij or goluboj; (iii) either goluboj or zelënyj. We observed a boundary response speed advantage for goluboj/zelënyj but not for sinij/goluboj. The frequency bias affected only the sinij/goluboj boundary such that in a lighter context, the boundary shifted towards lighter shades, and vice versa. Contrary to previous research, our results show that in Russian, stimulus discrimination at the lightness-defined blue BCC boundary is not reflected in processing speed. The sinij/goluboj boundary did have a sharper categorical transition than the dark blue/light blue boundary, but it was also affected by frequency and order biases, demonstrating that "Russian blues" are less well-structured than previously thought.

中文翻译：

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俄语布鲁斯揭示了影响颜色区分的语言的局限性。

与给定类别中比色等距的颜色相比，基本颜色类别（BCC；例如蓝色和绿色）边界上的色刺激的识别速度更快。俄语有两个BCC，分别是蓝色，sinij“深蓝色”和goluboj“浅蓝色”。据报道，这些特定于语言的BCC使得俄语为母语的人能够比英语为母语的人更快地辨别跨边界的深蓝和浅蓝（Winawer等，2007，PNAS，4，7780-7785）。我们在两个与引用的研究中采用相同任务的实验中，对这一发现进行了重新评估。在实验1中，俄语和英语为母语的人分别将颜色分类为sinij / goluboj或深蓝色/浅蓝色；接下来是颜色识别任务。在实验2中，俄语使用者最初对sinij / goluboj和goluboj /zelënyj“绿色”布景执行歧视任务。然后，他们在三个频率范围内对这些颜色进行分类，并给出每种刺激：（i）相等次数（无偏）；（ii）sinij或goluboj更频繁；（iii）goluboj或zelënyj。我们观察到了goluboj /zelënyj的边界响应速度优势，而sinij / goluboj则没有。频率偏差仅影响sinij / goluboj边界，因此在较亮的上下文中，边界移向较浅的阴影，反之亦然。与先前的研究相反，我们的结果表明，在俄语中，亮度定义的蓝色BCC边界处的刺激识别并没有反映在处理速度上。与深蓝色/浅蓝色边界相比，sinij / goluboj边界确实具有更清晰的分类过渡，