On the Color-Vocabulary of Children. 13 



the list used in several first-grade rooms. The preceding 

 table exhibits the number of correct answers in a thousand 

 for the more common colors by children of different ages. 

 M indicates males, and F females. 



Careful study of this table yields some unexpected 

 results. It will be remembered that Preyer's child learned 

 to recognize and to name colors in the following order : yel- 

 low, brown, red, violet, black, pink, orange, gray, green, blue. 

 These children name them in an entirely different order. 

 White, black, and red were nearly always correctly named. 

 Blue clearly occupies the fourth place. During the first few 

 years even green precedes yellow, though on the whole this 

 order is reversed. Pink uniformly falls seventh, orange eighth, 

 and violet last. It is not strange that the position of orange 

 and violet should be very different in the two cases. Preyer's 

 child had been specially drilled in color-names, and these 

 children had, perhaps, seldom heard of orange or violet. The 

 remarkable change in the absolute and relative positions of 

 yellow and blue cannot be so easily accounted for. Yellow 

 was most easily recognized and named by the instructed 

 child. Uninstructed children, a few years older, name four 

 other colors more accurately. Blue was by far the most 

 difficult of ten colors to Preyer's child. In my experiments 

 it was scarcely the most difficult of four colors, being almost 

 as surely named as red or black. 



The most constant progress during the first three years is 

 to be observed in connection with yellow and green. It is 

 found among both boys and girls. The table also shows 

 that the improvement in yellow exceeds that in green. On 

 the whole, the girls appear to name green more correctly 

 than yellow, while the reverse is true of the boys. Whether 

 this fact in any way depends upon the greater frequency of 

 color-blindness among the boys, cannot be decided without 

 further investigation. It ought to be said, however, that 

 many writers on color-blindness have acquired the habit of 

 referring to it as an absolute instead of a relative defect. 

 There are, doubtless, degrees of color-perception as well as 



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