The fact that verbal interference was abkle to disrupt the advantage enjioyed by russians is a strong prdictor that the effect is due to verbal labels and not due to perceptual training. If the effect was due to perceptual training, it should not have been effecetd by Verbal interference.

Also , I suggets this advantage would be more prominent in RVF, which is processed by left hemsiphere and would again show a linguistic involvement.

If you have a linguistic category that separates Red1 from Red2, this will lead to a lot of training for the discrimination of these two colors. And, in my opinion, the fact that training can lead to new divisions in perceptual categories is not very surprising, nor novel.

So, it is simply a result of lots of practice at discrimination that causes the noted effect of faster discrimination times (a result seen elsewhere in psychological research). That this practice happens to be the result of a linguistic category is moderately interesting, but I dont think it supports anything like the sapir-whorf hypothesis. In other words, it is training that drives the result, and what drives the training may be interesting, but I can’t see why it is terribly exciting.

As for #5 , I find the example of people in US using dark an dlight blue as traffic lights very informative. I still disagree with the 3) that verbal interference would not have any effect. I believe that if such traffic light usage was there and English had also invented new words to discriminate between dark and light blue, we would definitely see that verbal interference affects discriminative performance. Alas this cannot be settled by experimental investigation.

I am curious about one thing relating to your visit. Does Maharashtra mean “Great nose (or face)” in sanskrit?

That out of the way, I would like to reply in particular with your #5. I think that you may well be making my point.

First, are you aware of any experiment similar to Brodotisky’s to determine if Americans living in the U.S. discriminate between red and green better than those living in other countries? Based upon an insufficiently controlled, but widely known, experiment, in which the subjects have a demonstrable immediate need to discriminate red from green, verbal interference would seem clearly not to affect the results appreciably. Of course, the experiment is called driving and American drivers fit either one of two categories as it relates to this question: either 1) deficient or dangerous drivers (who are culturally selected against by various means) or 2) drivers who discriminate between red and green, in a fraction of a second, regardless of even the most obtrusive verbal disruptions and always manage to stop for a red light.

I think that experience suggests that persons from cultures that do not employ red and green for their traffic lights (or to supply some other immediate need) will discriminate less effectively and will probably be more prone to verbal interference. This also suggests, by the way, that if traffic lights in the U.S. employed the colors of dark and light blue: 1) Americans would invent separate names for the two shades (or give different mental values to the tonal descriptions effectively making them designate a difference of type); 2) They would be more effective in discriminating than T=2 Russians; and 3) verbal interference would have little or no effect on the supperior ability to discriminate between the colors.

1. “Can words come into a language by any other means than T=1? If discrimination between “goluboy” and “siniy” were selected for throughout the population by genetic rather than cultural evolution would there be any need for language to provide the capability?”
Here, I beg to differ. It may be possible that color discrimination between goluboy and siniy had selection advantages and was genetically selected for; and in this case as the population (over selection period) becomes more and more able to distinguish between goluboy and siniy, the corresponding language terms for dark blue and light blue would also evolve. Genetic selection might have been possible; but I doubt that that is the case. If their were stable genetic differences in Russsians vis-a-vis others ability to discriminate between dark blue and light blue, then the capability to do so should not have disappeared in the Russian data set when they were subjected to verbal interference. The fact that Russians too lost the ability to distinguish between dark blue and light blue when subjected to verbal interference strongly suggests that this discriminative superiority is solely due to linguistic factor sand not due to genetics.

2. As for whether Brodotisky’s experiments would differ based on T=2 or T=3, yes at T=3 one should not see the Russian discriminative advantage.

3. I agree that at T= 1 and T=3, the naming strategies may not be effective and provide no Russian advantage.

4. About the non-native speakers, I believe they might show the Russian advantage only at T=2. They might not show any advantage at all as the underlying circuitry (the verbal circuitry feeding back to perceptual circuitry) might be formed during a critical developmental window.

5. Lastly, I do not agree, that if both terms described an immediate function need, then mediacy of language might not be required. Red and green both serve immediate functional needs in English and yet we have different language terms for it. the mediacy of language is present.

Overall though I found your comment very thought provoking.