Sex and Skill Differences in Translation of English Color Words by Chinese Students

Abstract

The present study investigated sex and skill differences in color-word translation by Chinese-speaking students in university English classes. A questionnaire was administered to estimate the correlation between subjects' performance and their color-related hobbies. To conceptualize the issue better, two more groups of correlated parameter (academic achievements plus demographic factors) were introduced in this research as well. 40 English majors (20 women, 20 men), ranging in education from level one to level four, were randomly drawn from a metropolitan university and tested in the experiments as subjects. These university students were asked to provide Chinese equivalents for a list of 33 elaborated English color terms chosen from a thesaurus by mapping on the 11 color-tone categories defined by basic color theory. The results confirm the findings in relevant studies that used native speakers as subjects by observing that (1) women possessed a richer color vocabulary both in their source language and in their target language, (2) women also provided more elaborated Chinese equivalents to the color words used as stimuli, and finally, (3) women showed a superiority in accuracy in this color-lexicon matching or translating task. As a whole, the effects of skill and age were not significant. A significant correlation was found between the learners' proficiency in English and performance in translation of color words, but this relationship was rather weak and only true for the men. Color-related hobbies did not significantly correlate with the color-decoding performance of these language learners. Neither did the demographic factors. Taken together, it is sensible to state that differences reported here were affected primarily by the sex of the learner, conditionally by language proficiency, and presumably by the cognitive and perceptual sex differences as well. These findings further indicate that the process of color codability is a complicated but unstudied issue in language learning and that sex should be treated as an independent variable in this area of research.

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