Mandarine and Spanish basic color terms vis-à-vis

It is still debated how many basic color terms (BCTs) Mandarin has and how they are used compared to Western languages like Spanish. For clarifying this, we analysed the performance of 21 Mandarin speakers and 21 European Spanish speakers in two related tasks: the list task and the color naming task. Our results suggest that Mandarin has 9 BCTs in line with Gao and Sutrop (2014), while Spanish has 11 BCTs, in line with Lillo et al. (2007). We further found that Mandarin speakers use some of the common BCTs less consistently than Spanish speakers. Overall, both languages partition the color space similarly. Our findings show that there are universal constraints on color naming, that are compatible with subtle cross-cultural differences in how colors are used.