  Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar.
An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged
independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual
biases. A computational model has recently shown how this could be the case,
focusing on the paradigmatic example of the universal properties of colour
naming patterns, and producing results in quantitative agreement with the
experimental data. Here we investigate the role of an individual perceptual
bias in the framework of the model. We study how, and to what extent, the
structure of the bias influences the corresponding linguistic universal
patterns. We show that the cultural history of a group of speakers introduces
population-specific constraints that act against the pressure for uniformity
arising from the individual bias, and we clarify the interplay between these
two forces.
