Nottingham Toddler Lab

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Development of Colour Cognition

Collaborative research between University of Nottingham, UK, and McGill University, Canada

Young children often have difficulties learning to name colours. Toddlers usually learn colour words later than they learn the words for everyday objects and when they can say some colour words they often use them incorrectly when naming colours. You may have noticed this with your own toddler. Sometimes they will name all colours with only one colour word, and other times they will use many colour words to name the same colour. Our research is trying to find out why toddlers find colour words difficult to learn. Is there something special about colour that prevents toddlers learning colour words easily?

Over a series of studies we have tried to find out why toddler experience difficulties learning colour words. We tested the following possibilities:

Do toddlers have difficulties seeing differences between colours?
No. They can see colours within the first few months of life and can tell similar colours apart, even when they cannot name colours.

Do toddlers have difficulty attending to colours?
No. In fact toddlers find colours to be very attention grabbing and will often use colour as a basis for grouping objects together.

Do toddlers confuse visually similar colours when learning colour names?
Yes. When they are first learning colour words they confuse very different colours, such as red and blue. As they get more practice with colour words they tend to confuse visually similar colours, like red and pink.

Is there an order in which toddlers learn colour words?
Yes. Toddlers learn some colour words before others. They often find brown and grey especially difficult to learn and they tend to confuse these two colour words.

At what age do toddlers learn colour words?
Toddlers can usually name red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, black and white correctly by around 3 years of age but they often take a little while longer before they can name brown and grey correctly.

Do caregivers use some colours words more often than others when talking to toddlers?
Yes. Some colour words are used more often than others by caregivers when talking to toddlers, but often this does not predict which colour words toddlers will know.

Do toddlers like certain colours over others?
Yes. Both boys and girls tend to dislike the colours brown and grey, which are the most difficult colours for toddlers to learn.

Dr. Nikki Pitchford (University of Nottingham) and Dr. Kathy Mullen (McGill University, Canada) conducted this research and the University of Nottingham, Universitas 21, and the Canadian Institute of Health Research helped to fund it.

You may meet Nikki Pitchford here at the Nottingham Toddler Lab.