Name That Color
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For 2-year-old Akira (left), a trip to the art museum is not about culture and contemplation. It's about Thomas the Tank Engine and his locomotive pals. Pointing to the huge, raging-blue mural hanging in the museum lobby, he yells, "Thomas!" as if recognizing a long-lost friend. This may not seem like evidence of early color recognition, but in fact Akira has taken an important step. He's linking a word to a color, even if it is the name of a like-hued talking train.
The perceptual foundation for color is in place as early as 4 months. Studies have shown that babies seem to recognize colors and can mentally group shades (sky blue, navy) into a category (blues). You'll first see evidence of this when your toddler sorts toys by color. But the road to actually labeling colors with their correct names is long and winding for most.
Children first learn words by "mapping" a label (fire truck) onto an experience or representation of a word (siren, ladder), and storing both together in their memory. But color is abstract. Green on its own doesn't give any information about function. Even an adult would be stumped by "Describe green." So when Akira yells, "Thomas!" he's trying to apply a concrete label to the abstract blue.
As word mapping skills progress, children, when prompted, will point to show you what's red. They hear the color name and sift through stored color information to retrieve the image from memory — a feat in itself, but not yet the Emerald City of color learning. Fine-tuning of these memory maps continues for some time, until, at the surprisingly late ages of 4 to 7, kids begin identifying colors on their own and naming them accurately — the final stage of knowing your colors, and an essential skill for I Spy.
