The research presented in this book challenges the notion that languages develop color terms independently of other languages. Authors find a universal inventory of eleven basic color categories from which the basic color terms are drawn. Authors also find an apparent fixed sequence of evolutionary stages through which a language must pass as its color vocabulary increases. A postive correlation between cultural complexity and complexity of color vocabulary is observed.

This article examines the variation in color naming and susceptibility to visual illusions cross-culturally. Results suggest a geographic patterning of color naming and illusion susceptibility which parallels the distribution of eye pigmentation.

The authors design and implement two tasks requiring linguistic and non-linguistic spatial reference across a linguistically-diverse sample in order to examine the relationship between language and cognition cross-culturally. The results, which indicate large conceptual variation in frame of spatial reference across as well as strong correlation between use of absolute descriptors and absolute cognitive representations within language communities, suggest that language structure may actively shape the systems of spatial representation available to different cultural groups.

Using a sample derived from the available folk tale literature, researchers test whether the salience of color terms in folk tales follow the evolutionary sequence put forth by Berlin and Kay (1969). Results support the hypothesis.

Different languages contain different numbers of basic colors. One interpretation is that more complex societies will have more basic color terms. Another interpretation is that peoples with less pigmented eyes will have more basic color terms. This paper suggests that both interpretations are necessary in order to predict the number of basic color terms.

This book examines population growth rate and its correlates by testing 274 hypotheses (derived from multiple theories) with an 18-society sample. Forty-one of these hypotheses were significant at the .05 level, leading the author to accept these relationships as reflective of the real world. The 274 hypotheses are grouped into 51 broader hypotheses, and marked by (*) where relationships are significant as designated by the author or by significance p < 0.05.

Authors study the correlation between maternal behavior and reference to odors in folktales. They find several significant relationships between odor references in folk tales, maternal behavior, and various aspects of infant and child socialization.

Previous research has found that words are replaced faster in language vocabularies the less the word is used, whereas words that are used more frequently endure longer. Drawing from this theory, the authors of this article propose two questions: 1) Is the rate of replacement for Indo-European kinship terms correlated with their usage frequency? 2) How does this relationship differ between kinship terms and core vocabulary? Using phylogenetic comparative methods to analyze 10 kinship categories from 47 Indo-European languages, the authors find that more frequently used kinship terms tend to be replaced at a much slower rate than less frequently used words. Furthermore, this relationship between word replacement rate and usage frequency is stronger for kinship terms than it is for core vocabulary terms.

This paper provides a linguistic study of the effect of lexical acculturation on the names given to days of the week. Findings show that loan words are used most frequently adopted for weekend days, followed by the days of the week that are closest to the weekends, and least frequently adopted for the days in the middle of the seven-day cycle.

How do subsystems of language evolve over time? It is commonly assumed that grammatical changes of language are slower than vocabulary changes. Using a Dirichlet process mixture model to analyze rates of language evolution in 81 Austronesian languages, the authors find that to the contrary, the grammatical features of language tend to change at a faster rate than basic vocabulary. Furthermore, their results show that grammatical features have higher rates of homoplasy, more frequent contact-induced change, and less deliberate differentiation than basic vocabulary.