Color as a Grammatical Marker

When we think about the role of color in language, we almost always think of description. We talk about the blue sky, a red car, or feeling green with envy. In these cases, color is part of the content—it adds descriptive detail to the world we’re talking about. But what if color wasn’t just for describing things? What if it was a fundamental part of the language’s grammar, as essential as verb endings or word order?

In a handful of fascinating communication systems, this is exactly the case. Color—either literally or as a powerful analogy—steps out of its descriptive role and becomes a grammatical marker. It helps distinguish meaning, clarify ambiguity, and provide structural cues. Let’s explore how this works in two powerful systems: Cued Speech and Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC).

What is a Grammatical Marker, Anyway?

Before we dive in, let’s quickly clarify what a grammatical marker is. In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme (a unit of meaning) that indicates the grammatical function of a word or phrase. Think about the -s in “cats.” That tiny letter doesn’t describe the cats; it marks them as plural. The -ed in “walked” marks the action as having occurred in the past.

These markers are part of a closed, systematic set. You can’t just invent a new plural marker for fun. They are the nuts and bolts of a language’s structure. Now, imagine a system where a specific color or a “color-coded” hand gesture performs this same kind of grammatical work.

Cued Speech: “Coloring” Phonemes to Make Them Clear

Cued Speech is not a sign language; it’s a visual communication system that makes spoken language entirely visible. Developed by Dr. R. Orin Cornett in 1966, it was designed to help deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals overcome the ambiguities of lip-reading.

The Problem: Too Many Look-Alikes

Spoken languages are made of phonemes (distinct sounds). English has around 40 phonemes, but many of them look identical on the lips. Sounds that look the same on the lips are called visemes. For example, the words pat, bat, and mat look virtually indistinguishable to a lip-reader. The phonemes /p/, /b/, and /m/ all belong to the same viseme group. This makes lip-reading a high-stakes guessing game; even the best lip-readers only catch about 30-40% of what’s being said.

The Solution: A System of Visual Grammar

Cued Speech solves this problem by pairing lip movements with a simple system of hand cues. It uses eight different handshapes and four different locations (placements) near the mouth. The magic is how they are combined.

• The handshape differentiates consonant phonemes within a viseme group.
• The placement (side, chin, throat, corner of the mouth) differentiates vowel phonemes.

Dr. Cornett himself used a color analogy to explain his system. Think of the handshapes as “colors” for consonants and the placements as “colors” for vowels. To cue the word “mat”, you would use the handshape for /m/ combined with the placement for the /æ/ vowel, all while speaking the word naturally. For “bat”, you would use a different handshape (the one for the /b/ group) at the same vowel placement.

Here’s where the “grammatical marker” concept clicks in. The handshape is not a descriptive gesture; its sole purpose is to mark which consonant is being spoken from a group of visually identical options. It’s a phonological differentiator. Just as the -s marker in English grammar disambiguates singular from plural, the handshape in Cued Speech disambiguates /p/ from /b/ from /m/. The handshape acts as a “color filter” that reveals the true phoneme, making the spoken language 100% clear. It’s grammar at the level of sound.

AAC: Using Color to Build Sentences

Another powerful example of color as grammar comes from the world of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). AAC systems are tools that help individuals with complex communication needs express themselves. These can range from simple picture boards to sophisticated speech-generating devices.

The Fitzgerald Key and Modern Systems

Many modern AAC systems, especially those for emerging communicators, use a color-coding system based on a method developed by Edith Fitzgerald in the 1920s to teach sentence structure to deaf children. This system, often called the Fitzgerald Key, was later adapted for AAC by Goossens’, Crain, and Elder (GCE). It assigns a specific color to different grammatical categories, or parts of speech.

While variations exist, a common layout looks like this:

• Yellow for pronouns and people (e.g., I, you, she, the boy)
• Green for verbs and action words (e.g., go, want, play, eat)
• Blue for descriptive words and adjectives (e.g., big, fast, happy)
• Orange for nouns and things (e.g., ball, school, cookie)
• Pink/Purple for social words, prepositions, and questions (e.g., please, in, on, what)

Color as a Syntactic Scaffold

In this system, color is not describing the word; it’s marking its grammatical category. The button for “eat” is green not because the act of eating is green, but because “eat” is a verb. This has profound linguistic advantages:

1. Reduces Cognitive Load: The human brain processes color incredibly fast. A user looking for an action word doesn’t have to read every label; they can scan for a green button. This is especially helpful for pre-literate users or those with cognitive challenges.
2. Teaches Sentence Structure: The color system provides a visual scaffold for grammar (syntax). Users learn that a typical English sentence follows a pattern, like Yellow-Green-Orange (“I want cookie”). This visual feedback helps them internalize the Subject-Verb-Object structure of the language they are learning to use.
3. Aids Motor Planning: As users become more proficient, they begin to remember where the colors are on their device. They know the “action” words are generally in one area (the green section), and “things” are in another (the orange section). This motor memory, or motor planning, makes communication faster and more automatic.

The color itself functions as a grammatical marker for syntax. It visually flags a word as a “noun”, “verb”, or “adjective”, providing the user with the grammatical information they need to combine words into meaningful sentences.

Language Is More Flexible Than We Think

The use of color in Cued Speech and AAC systems is a brilliant demonstration of human ingenuity. It shows that the core components of grammar—differentiation, categorization, and structure—are not limited to sounds and written symbols. A handshape can be a phonological marker, and a patch of color on a screen can be a syntactic one.

These systems challenge our conventional understanding of language and reveal its underlying flexibility. They prove that to build a system of meaning, we can use whatever channels are available to us—sound, sight, movement, and yes, even color—turning it from mere decoration into the very grammar of communication.