Experiential and linguistic factors attune colour concepts:
‘Blues’ of Italian speakers

Colour concepts are phenomenological entities formed by communicative efficiency in a language population. In my lecture I will focus on the main Italian ‘blue’ categories denoted by blu ‘dark blue’, azzurro ‘light/medium blue’ and celeste ‘light blue’, and report on a series of recent psycholinguistic experiments, which elucidate the malleability of colour representations by specific experiential and linguistic factors. We sought to quantify the semantic power of blu and azzurro (Paramei et al., 2026). In a Stroop task, we presented the words blu and azzurro either in dark or light blue ink, and measured the response speed of naming the ink colour. We hypothesized that in incongruent combinations, blu word–light blue ink and azzurro word–dark blue ink, highly frequent in Italian blu would manifest greater semantic (inhibitory) power. Unexpectedly, not blu but azzurro revealed strong Stroop interference. We argue that the semantic power of azzurro reflects its stronger ideation and greater processing automaticity driven by its deep entrenchment in Italian, in spite of its lower use frequency. We investigated the dynamics of the main ‘blue’ categories in an experiment with late Italian-English bilinguals, who named stimuli in the blue area of colour space (Paramei & Douven, in preparation). The immersion context was found to modulate, in both L1 and L2, the structure of the ‘blue’ categories, whose denotative extent was larger than in monolinguals. In L2, bilinguals’ blue prototype is considerably darker than that of English monolinguals. The blue→blu prototype shift is probably explained by these cognates being near-homophones/-homographs, while also manifesting that Italian (L1) dominates in the colour domain.

Galina V. Paramei is Professor Emerita. In 2008–2024 she was Professor of Psychology at Liverpool Hope University (UK). She graduated from and obtained her PhD (1983) in General Psychology at Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia). In 1992–1994, she was a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany). Her Habilitation (postdoctorate degree) in Cognitive Psychology (2003) is from Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) and Venia legendi in Cognitive Neuroscience (2003) from Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg (Germany).

Prof. Paramei's specialty is in color vision psychophysics and in color cognition. In her psycholinguistic studies, in particular, she explores color naming and color categorization in her native Russian and cross-cultural differences with English, her second language. Her lasting cooperation with colleagues from Italy (Verona, Florence, Sassari) resulted in publications on Italian color lexicon and on denotative meaning of basic “Italian blues”. Further, she studies effects of bilingualism on changes in semantic representations of ‘blue’ categories in both languages of Italian-English bilinguals.

Prof. Paramei (co)authored about 120 papers in international journals, books and conference proceedings. She co-edited two acclaimed collective monographs on color cognition: Anthropology of Color: Interdisciplinary Multilevel Modeling (2007) (https://benjamins.com/catalog/z.137) and Progress in Colour Studies: Cognition, Language and Beyond (2018) (https://benjamins.com/catalog/z.217). Recently she published a comprehensive review Language of Color (in the Modern Age; https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/cultural-history-of-color-in-the-modern-age-9781474273367/).

Since 1999 Prof. Paramei is a member of the International Colour Vision Society, currently (2022–2026) as a member of the ICVS Board of Directors. In 2008 she joined The Colour Group (Great Britain) and co-organized several annual CGGB meetings (2010, 2012, 2015). In 2015–2025, she was Co-Chairwoman of the Study Group 'Language of Colour' of the International Colour Association (AIC) (https://aic-color.org/sg-lc). From 2022, she serves as a Senior Editor of Color Research and Application being co-editor of the Color Cognition Special Collection (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1002/(ISSN)1520-6378.ColorCognition).

Prof. Paramei is a regular participant of PICS conferences. At PICS 2016 (London), she chaired the Programme Committee and at PICS 2022 (Tallinn) delivered a keynote Communicative need drives colour language refinement: The riches of ‘Italian blues’.