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My first notes on this topic (Bradley, 1970) ended: 'Whether or not the defect usually acts as an independent factor contributing to a pervasive subjective uncertainty and an insecurity in object relations that may in turn be well hidden from consciousness … remains to be seen from the findings of others.' Strongly supporting evidence in favour of the hypothesis comes from current research into the colourvision of infants.
Bornstein, Kessen & Weiskopf (1976) studied 80 four-month-old Caucasian infants, equally distributed as to sex, in an ingeniously designed experiment based on the length of time an infant gazed at two coloured stimuli after having been habituated to one of them. I refer to their paper for the details. They found that 'differential responding evidenced infants' categorical perception of hue; that is, infants see the physically continuous spectrum as divided into the hue categories of blue, green, yellow, and red', i.e. the same categories common to adults. The infants perceived a blue to green boundary between 480 and 510 nanometers, and parallel patterns of findings indicated hue boundaries for infants from green to yellow and from yellow to red.
The authors added that the parallel existence of these categories in infants and adults 'is significant for understanding what organization the child brings to language'. Thus, the child who is said to be learning his colours is not learning to distinguish them, he is learning names for the hues which he has always clearly distinguished.
It follows that a colour-defective infant has likewise organized his perceptions of colours by four months of age and has been 'using' that organization for two, three or four years when he finds that parts of his organization of hues, now coming to be named, do not correspond with those of other persons, and that he cannot spontaneously and readily give some hues the names given them by others. Those others usually seem not to notice, perhaps from a kindly readiness