Hanna and Antonio Damasio have written about language and the perception of color, and three different kinds aphasia relating to color: achromatopsia, damage to the occipital region that prevents percieving or even imagining colors (this relates back to what I mentioned about the same areas being used both to see and remember seeing); lesions to left posterior temporal and inferior parietal cortex, which prevent proper formation of words ("buh" instead of "blue") but which affect all speech, not just color speech; and color anomia, damage to the temporal segment of the left lingual gyrus, which prevents you from being able to name any colors even though you still perceive and can match and discriminate between colors non-verbally. So, there seems to be a very specific locus where color perception gets coded as color language, but the perception can still go on normally even when the ability to encode the perception as language is destroyed.
Posted by joshua at May 7, 2004 02:57 AM