CHAPTER TWO COGNITIVE ENTRENCHMENT OF COLOR CATEGORIES AND IMPLICIT ATTITUDES IN ENGLISH JODI SANDFORD 1. Introduction Color categories involve color dimensions such as hue, lightness/brightness, and saturation. This paper discusses a novel application of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to the linguistic categorization and cognitive semantics testing to color categorization of the hue dimension with pleasantness, and the lightness/brightness dimension with spatial relations in English. The hypothesis of this study is that categorization of color/visual words is related to specific contexts and associations, yet at the same time there are underlying conceptual metaphors and metonymies that guide our attitudes toward certain conceptual linguistic combinations. These serve as default construals that are not as subjective as they feel, but are embodied and grounded in our experience of the categories themselves. I endorse Gibbs’ definition of the embodied mind, which specifies that embodiment is more than “physiological and/or brain activity, and is constituted by recurring patterns of kinesthetic, proprioceptive action” including all the particulars of the body in action. These characteristics of human conceptualization, these patterns of linguistic structure and behavior, may be evinced from language, “they are not arbitrary or due to conventions, but are motivated by recurring embodied experience (i.e. image schemas), which are often metaphorically extended”. It is further pertinent to point out how the body is not a “culture-free” object; all elements of our experience are immersed in cultural processes that they in turn reflect (2005, 12–13). In other words, the COLOR categories or concepts are cognitively entrenched, according to both our embodied environmental and cultural linguistic