Cognitive Representation of Color in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Analysis

This paper investigates the distinctive features of mental representation, categorization, and semantic encoding of color among individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The novelty of the present research lies in the integrated assessment of the semantic salience of basic and high-frequency non-basic color terms through a combination of linguistic and psycholinguistic indices. The study also identifies specific regions within the color space that undergo lexical refinement in the vocabulary of individuals with ASD. Particular research objectives include the identification of potential differences in color-naming strategies employed by autistic individuals and the reconstruction of a conceptual map of color terms. The empirical data were collected from 32 native Russian speakers diagnosed with ASD (17 females and 15 males, aged 16–28; mean age = 19.8, SD = 2.7) and a matched control group comparable in gender, age, and educational background. Data collection was conducted using a free-listing task. The findings demonstrate that individuals with ASD possess a less dense and less homogeneous color lexicon compared to neurotypical native speakers of Russian. Their expression of hue variation is more conventional and less diverse, with a predominant reliance on perceptual similarity and associative proximity in the cognitive structuring of color shades.