Color qualia—the subjective experience of color, such as the quality of redness—are similar across age and culture. Using a task that obtained pairwise similarity judgments via intuitive visual interfaces, researchers tested children aged 3 to 12 in Japan and 6 to 8 in China, comparing them with Japanese adults. About half of 3-year-olds completed the touch-panel task reliably. Despite developmental and cultural differences in color-term usage, color qualia structures were quite similar across all groups. This suggests that these structures emerge early in life. Subtle age-related differences in evaluations of some color pairs imply minor changes in color experience with development.
Language emergence and the relational structure of subjective experiences, termed qualia structure, may influence each other bidirectionally. The emergence of languages with distributional semantics, such as syntactic-semantic structures, is hypothesized to link to the coordination of internal representations shaped by experience, potentially facilitating more structured language through reciprocal influence. This mutual dependency is explored through theoretical frameworks like collective predictive coding. Computational studies show that neural network-based language models form systematically structured internal representations, and multimodal language models can share representations between language and perceptual information. Language emergence may serve not only as a communication tool but also as a mechanism for shared understanding of qualitative experiences. The paper outlines future constructive research directions in consciousness studies, linguistics, and cognitive science.