Cognitive Representation of Color in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Analysis

This paper investigates the distinctive features of mental representation, categorization, and semantic encoding of color among individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The novelty of the present research lies in the integrated assessment of the semantic salience of basic and high-frequency non-basic color terms through a combination of linguistic and psycholinguistic indices. The study also identifies specific regions within the color space that undergo lexical refinement in the vocabulary of individuals with ASD. Particular research objectives include the identification of potential differences in color-naming strategies employed by autistic individuals and the reconstruction of a conceptual map of color terms. The empirical data were collected from 32 native Russian speakers diagnosed with ASD (17 females and 15 males, aged 16–28; mean age = 19.8, SD = 2.7) and a matched control group comparable in gender, age, and educational background. Data collection was conducted using a free-listing task. The findings demonstrate that individuals with ASD possess a less dense and less homogeneous color lexicon compared to neurotypical native speakers of Russian. Their expression of hue variation is more conventional and less diverse, with a predominant reliance on perceptual similarity and associative proximity in the cognitive structuring of color shades.

1. Autism. World Health Organization. Available at: https://www.who.int/ru/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/autism-spectrum-disorders (accessed 12.11.2025).

2. Bimler, D., Uusküla, M. (2018). Individual variations in color-concept space replicate across languages. Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision, 35 (4): B184—B191. DOI: 10.1364/JOSAA.35.00B184.

3. Bimler, D., Uusküla, M. (2021). Two indices are better than one: building on Robbins, Nolan, and Chen). Field Methods, 33 (1): 42—51. DOI: 10.1177/1525822X20945063.

4. Bolton, R. (1978). Black, white, and red all over: the riddle of color term salience. Ethnology, 17 (3): 287—311. DOI: 10.2307/3773198.

5. Bosten, J. M. (2022). Do you see what I see? Diversity in human color perception. Annual Review of Vision Science, 8 (1): 101—133. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-vision-093020-112820.

6. Davies, I. R. L., Corbett, G. G. (1995). A practical field method for identifying probable basic colour terms. Languages of the World, 9: 25—36.

7. Davies, I. R. L., Corbett, G. G. (1994). The basic color terms of Russian. Linguistics, 32: 65—89.

8. Del Viva, M. M., Castellotti, S., Paramei, G. V. (2023). The Italian colour lexicon in Tuscany : elicited lists, cognitive salience, and semantic maps of colour terms. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10 (90). DOI: 10.1057/s41599-023-02393-4.

9. Ferrer i Cancho, R., Sole, R. V. (2003). Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 100 (3): 788—791. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0335980100.

10. Griber Yu. A. (2025). Metacognitive mechanisms of color communication. Journal of Modern Foreign Psychology, 14 (3): 20—29. DOI: 10.17759/jmfp.2025140302. (In Russ.).

11. Griber, Yu. A., Ivleva, A. I., Solovyev, V. D., Paramei, G. V. (2026). The Russian colour lexicon and its diatopic variation: elicited lists, cognitive salience of colour terms, and neologism boom. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications. DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-07021-5.

12. Hidaka, K. (2024). The Art of Color Categorization. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 193 p. ISBN 9783031476891.

13. Jakovljev, I., Zdravković, Z. (2018). The colour lexicon of the Serbian language — A study of dark blue and dark red colour categories. Psihologija, 51 (2): 197—213. DOI: 10.2298/PSI160521002J.

14. Kusuma Wardani, N., Fefiana Mustikasari, B. (2023). Colour preference on Picture Therapy Cards in children with ASD. KnE Social Sciences, 8 (15): 244—251. DOI: 10.18502/kss.v8i15.13938.

15. Lillo, J., Gonzalez-Perilli, F., Prado-León, L. R., Melnikova, A. D., Álvaro, A. L., Collado, J. A., Moreira, H. (2018). Basic color terms (BCTs) and categories (BCCs) in three dialects of the spanish language: interaction between cultural and universal factors. Frontiers in Psychology, 9 (761). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00761.

16. Lindsey, D. T., Brown, A. M. (2014). The color lexicon of American English. Journal of Vision, 14 (17). DOI: 10.1167/14.2.17.

17. Liu, L. (2025). Analysing the impact of sensory processing differences on color and texture preferences in individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12 (1408). DOI: 10.1057/s41599-025-05753-4.

18. Lukina, A. E. (2024). The concept of “linguistic variability” in the Russian and foreign linguistic tradition. Bulletin of SUSU. The series “Linguistics”, 11 (1): 7—11. (In Russ.).

19. Maule, J., Skelton, A. E., Franklin, A. (2023). The Development of Color Perception and Cognition. Annual review of psychology, 74: 87—111. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-032720-040512.

20. Moreira, H., Álvaro, L., Lillo, J. (2024). Color blindness and semantic knowledge: cognition of color terms from elicited lists in dichromats and normal observers. Color Research & Application, 9 (5): 420—432. DOI: 10.1002/col.22925.

21. Nair, A. S., Priya, R. S., Rajagopal, P., Pradeepa, C., Senthil, S., Dhanalakshmi, S., Lai, K. W., Wu, X., Zuo, X. (2022). A case study on the effect of light and colors in the built environment on autistic children’s behavior. Frontiers in psychiatry, 13 (1042641). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.1042641.

22. Stausberg, M. (2022). Free-listing. In: The Routledge handbook of research methods in the study of religion. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. 554—564. ISBN 9781032119823.

23. Sutrop, U. (2001). List task and a cognitive salience index. Field Methods, 13: 263—276.

24. Ward, Jr. J. H. (1963). Hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 58 (301): 236—244. DOI: 10.1080/01621459.1963.10500845.

25. Wijk, H., Berg, S., Sivik, L., Steen, B. (1999). Color discrimination, color naming and color preferences in 80-year-olds. Aging Clinical and Experimental Research, 11 (3): 176—185. DOI: 10.1007/BF03399660.

26. Xu, M., Zhu, J., Benítez-Burraco, A. (2023). A comparison of basic color terms in Mandarin and Spanish. Color Research & Application, 48 (6): 709—720. DOI: 10.1002/col.22863.