Linguistic and behavioural measures for ranking basic colour terms

1 The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged (award number R000 23 3978). We are also very grateful to Sean Hammond for useful discussions on statistical matters. Abstract We report an attempt to find more objective measures for identifying basic colour terms. We investigate the types of measure available, both linguistic and behavioural, and the statistical techniques for establishing the closeness of fit with the predictions derived from Berlin and Kay. This leads to an investigation of the interrelation between the measures; having examined consistency across investigators and across languages we establish that certain measures give considerably better results than others. While the indicators point in the same direction, supporting Berlin and Kay to varying degrees, different measures serve different functions. 3