Abstract

Until recently, a number of research in color categorization has been tried to find out the relationship between language and thought, i.e., whether language influence color categorization. Nevertheless, there are two different theoretical positions which are confronting each other; one is linguistic relativity insisting that color categories are likely to vary as a function of cultural and linguistic differences and the other is linguistic universalism maintaining that color categorization is common at every language regardless of the number of basic color names and color categories being used. Recently, some cognitive neuropsychological research have also been tried to examine the relationship between the performance or eye movement in visual search task and hemispheric activation. In this paper, recent trends of color categorization study related to the issue were reviewed and particularly some recent findings which confirmed the relationship between color categorization and the hemispheric asymmetry of language processing by using visual search task and comparing the color category effects in right and left visual field were discussed from the linguistic relativist perspective.