Why Russians have two blues: how a colour word can speed up your eyes
30seconds
Russian has two basic words for blue, goluboy (light) and siniy (dark), and in a 2007 experiment Russian speakers were about 124 milliseconds faster at telling two close blues apart when they fell on opposite sides of that word border. English speakers showed no such gain, and a task that kept the verbal mind busy made the Russian advantage disappear.
Try the idea yourself: move the border across twenty equal steps of blue, then run a mini version of the matching test.
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