Concepts Are Restructured During Language Contact: The Birth of Blue and Other Color Concepts in Tsimane’-Spanish Bilinguals
研究Tsimane'语（颜色词少）母语者学习西班牙语后，母语颜色概念是否改变。发现双语者（30人）未借用西班牙语词，而是重构母语词义，使颜色区分更精确，如原本混用的“绿/蓝”概念变得分明。
Words and the concepts they represent vary across languages. Here we ask if mother-tongue concepts are altered by learning a second language. What happens when speakers of Tsimane’, a language with few consensus color terms, learn Bolivian Spanish, a language with more terms? Three possibilities arise: Concepts in Tsimane’ may remain unaffected, or they may be remapped, either by Tsimane’ terms taking on new meanings or by borrowing Bolivian-Spanish terms. We found that adult bilingual speakers ( n = 30) remapped Tsimane’ concepts without importing Bolivian-Spanish terms into Tsimane’. All Tsimane’ terms become more precise; for example, concepts of monolingual shandyes and yụshñus (~green or blue, used synonymously by Tsimane’ monolinguals; n = 71) come to reflect the Bolivian-Spanish distinction of verde (~green) and azul (~blue). These results show that learning a second language can change the concepts in the first language.