This Balloon is Red!

Scientific American Mind Matters published an article about color last week.  When our eyes receive a visual stimulus, some cells respond while others do not.  Depending on the combination of cells that fire (rods, red cones, green cones, and/or blue cones), our brain interprets as a color scheme.  Higher-order primates possess this tri-color vision which became useful for picking out nutritious leaves or ripened fruits.  The problem of color stems from the language we use.


The Sci Am article discusses how kids learn about colors.  It is a far more difficult task that parents seem to acknowledge.  I think the article has interesting applications to overall learning as well.  Because color surrounds us, younger children have a harder time determining what the different colors are compared to learning the differences between bears and dogs (example from the article).  However, a simple change in syntax affected how well children learned their colors.  If you say, "This is a red balloon", children get confused.  The balloon is the object, while "red" describes the object.  If you don't know what red really means you may think that red refers to the object leading to color confusion. On the other hand, you can say, "This balloon is red" allowing the child to identify the object and then associate the color word with a characteristic of the balloon.  To adults, it seems like a trivial difference, but the researchers found a significant improvement in learning color words.


Think about how we teach other things to kids of all ages.  Could we really see an improvement in education with such a small change in sentence structure?  Maybe, maybe not.  Mark Twain did say, "The difference between the right word(s) and the almost right word(s) is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

Image from: FunDraw.com