Why Johnny Can’t Name Colours

TL;DR
Kids are surrounded by colours so it is hard for them to distinguish the names of colours from each other e.g. when learning about bears and dogs, a dog and bear aren’t usually in the same place so a child learns a bear is not a dog.

And children learn nouns before colours, but when used prenominally (i.e. “a red balloon” instead of “a balloon that is red”) the child thinks the name of the balloon is red. Children who learned postnominally (i.e. “the balloon is red”) learned their colours much more quickly.

How common is this problem?

Well the article says “most kids” but other than that I can only see anecdotal evidence.

Divine Angel said:

Well the article says “most kids” but other than that I can only see anecdotal evidence.

Seems like rubbish. In my experience, kids learn the colours very early in the piece without any effort.

More anecdotal evidence: I brought this up with Little Miss’ day carer, who said that siblings tend to learn colours faster than first borns. She was intrigued by the idea of using the noun before the colour and will experiment with the toddlers.

You do know that males are much worse at naming colours than females, right. It has been proven by scientific test. Perhaps more interesting is that males and females will consistently give different names to the same colours.

mollwollfumble said:

You do know that males are much worse at naming colours than females, right. It has been proven by scientific test. Perhaps more interesting is that males and females will consistently give different names to the same colours.

Colour naming is a leaned thing. Colour perception is innate and depends on what retinal receptors your genes bequeathed you.