麻豆社

The extent to which language changes our colour experience is a debate that's been raging for over a century.

But psychologists may be closer to finding the answer.

In English, we have 11 basic colour terms, but some early languages had only 3 - light, dark and red.

Other languages have even more than us - Russian and Greek speakers, for example, have two terms for blue - a light sky blue and a dark navy. This could mean their brain is primed to notice these colours more quickly, so they perceive the world in a subtly different way than English speakers.

Inside Surrey Baby Lab psychologists test babies' reactions to different colours by measuring their brain waves. Intriguingly, they can tell that infants are already sorting shades into different colour categories, even before they learn to label them.

So are we hard-wired to tell our blues from our greens?

Presented by Tracey Logan

Producer: Michelle Martin

First broadcast on 麻豆社 Radio 4 in January 2013.