New parents often ask, “when should my baby/toddler/preschooler be able to identify colours?   How long does it take for them to learn?”

Of course every child is different.  But whatever their age, you can’t look at this as something that takes a certain amount of time to learn – unlike, for instance, potty training, which some research shows takes an average of 3 months whether you start at age 1 or age 4.

Young children are absorbing concepts of every kind of quality, pretty much from the moment they’re born. Smooth vs. rough, hot vs. cold, soft vs. hard, bright vs. dark, heavy vs. light, etc etc. Colour is just one of these sensory descriptive aspects of things.

Categorization and Language

Not only do our babies have to learn to recognize all these contrasting aspects in and of themselves, they also then have to sort out which labels apply to which type of aspect. For instance, say that you have a wooden ball which is blue, hard, heavy, and smooth. You say to the child “blue ball!” How does he know whether the sound-label “bloo” applies to the smoothness, the shape, the weight, the material, or the colour?

Of course, this all must take place after he already understands that the sound-label “ball” means this round object, and not one of its other physical characteristics.  Generally, “naming” labels (nouns) come to a child’s understanding before “descriptive” or adjective labels do.  This is by no means a hard and fast rule, however.   Whichever types of labels he is currently analyzing, however, even once he understands that there are these different types of aspects that he can differentiate and that can be labeled, he still has to categorize all the different sets of labels.

The label-set of colours is also a complex set.  Some attributes are labeled fairly simply, such as rough vs. smooth and light vs. heavy.  We generally identify these with only two different labels, and when there is gradation we refer to only “heavier” or “smoother”.  There is not a large set of words to label the different degrees of how rough or how heavy an object is.  Some sets are just slightly more complex, with “hot” and “cold” denoting easy-to-differentiate opposites, with a more subtle “warm” label occuring somewhere in between.  When there are clear opposites to work with, it is generally easier for a young child to determine the attributes being labeled.

Colour has no clear opposites.  Like the attribute set of “shapes”, rather than 2 opposite ends of a spectrum with gradients in between, it appears as whole set of discrete, individual descriptions.   (Of course as adults we understand that colour is indeed on a spectrum and each shades into the next, but our first understanding of colour is much more rigidly defined.)  The complexity of this label-set suggests that it is not at all unexpected for this to be one of the later categories for a young child to master.

What Parents Can Do To Encourage Colour Understanding

Now if you give a child that same ball mentioned above, and a soft, fluffy, blue sock with it, and then say “blue ball, blue sock”, he might then be able to recognize that the “bloo” label is the only thing that’s in common between the two objects, therefore it applies to the colour difference. Or, probably more likely, he stores that information away like a true scientist, taking it as his hypothesis that “bloo” means that particular colour, and then wait and test his hypothesis with a few more things before trying it out for himself.

This process is ongoing CONSTANTLY. So you can’t just say that they “start to learn” their colours at one point and then finish at another point. We only see the external manifestations of the learning process once they are already quite far along with it.

In general, once a child has successfully differentiated the “colour” attribute from other descriptive aspects, they will quickly learn all the colour labels/names. So once they have one or two colours, the rest will come pretty quickly. Usually, parents will assist this process when we can see that they’ve realized one or two colours, creating a kind of positive feedback loop, responding to their own externalizations of their categorizing efforts.  When they identify “blue”, we’ll start saying “yes, that’s a blue ball. And this ball is red, and this one is green.” Now that this child is certain we’re describing the ‘colour’ attribute, he is able to associate the other labels to the correct colours and it is now simply a matter of memorization — something babies and toddlers excel at quite naturally!

Colour Understanding – Wide Range of Normal

The age where this categorization successfully “clicks” varies tremendously from child to child, everything from 18months to 4 years is common and normal.   If one child is later in learning his colours, he might have been ‘early’ in identifying other attributes, and is just sorting them out in a different order than the child who learned their colours at a young age but didn’t understand “quiet” and “loud” until much older, for instance.  When we stop and consider the vast catalogue of attributes that a developing child must first recognize, then differentiate, then associate correct linguistic labels to, we should be much less concerned about the speed of acquisition of any particular labels, and more in respectful awe of the incredible absorptive intelligence of our youngsters!

Photo: Shewatchedthesky under creative commons

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