HOW IMPORTANT ARE WORDS FOR CONCEPTUAL COORDINATION?

In attempting to explain how words first emerged in language evolution, it is often assumed that words map passively onto a pre-existing static conceptual system (e.g., Hurford,2007). However, human thought is very flexible: we can conceptualise the same referent in many different ways, depending on the context and our goal. For instance, we may conceptualise a lion as a dangerous beast, a thrilling sight, an unusual dinner, etc. Moreover, concepts may have different scope for different people. As a result, one of the main functions of words may be to provide an efficient way to share and coordinate conceptualisations with others. Indeed, to the extent that people do conceptualise things differently, it is not easy to imagine how such gaps could be bridged without the help of words and language, and previous work has shown that verbal labels can enhance category learning (Lupyan, Rakison, & McClelland, 2007). Either way, looking into this issue could contribute to our understanding of how much the advent of public symbols transformed human cognition (Deacon, 1997). The question under empirical investigation here is thus the importance of words to conceptual coordination.

Before this issue can be addressed experimentally, there is an immediate methodological challenge. In particular, in order to assess the role of words in conceptual coordination, we need a way of getting at experimental participants' concepts without relying on words. The solution that will be adopted here is the use of free classification tasks (Malt, Sloman,Gennari, Shi, & Wang, 1999): participants partition a set of items into groups, and these groups are assumed to be referential snapshots of their concepts.

I present here an experiment within the free classification framework which pits the importance of words against that of referential information. Pairs of native English speakers conducted a sequence of thirty free classification tasks involving a fluid domain of triangle-like stimuli. In each task, participants had to individually sort a set of eleven stimuli into two categories, and to label their categories. Their goal was to partition the stimuli into the same (or as similar as possible) two groups as their partner (irrespective of the labels used). Participants could not interact or communicate freely during the experiment, but they did receive feedback at the end of each task. All participants were shown their partnership's joint task score, and, depending on the condition that they were assigned to, either their partner's category groupings, category labels, both or neither (thus the experiment had a 2×2 between-pairs design).

The results revealed several patterns. First, although label agreement within pairs correlated with higher task scores, there were plenty of exceptions, where the participants used the same labels but differed in their category groupings, or achieved identical groupings despite using different labels. Second, averaging across the tasks, grouping feedback resulted in significantly higher scores, and these were higher still if accompanied by label feedback as well. On the other hand, label feedback on its own did not result in higher scores. Third, although there was a lot of fluctuation in scores even within pairs, they tended to go up over time, except in the groupings-only condition, where they stayed about the same. Due to these last two patterns, by the end of the experiment, the scores in the both condition were significantly higher than in the other three conditions. Thus it was only in the condition with both kinds of feedback that pairs started off with relatively high scores and improved over time.

Together, these results suggest that rich referential information is more useful than words for conceptual coordination, but thai high levels of coordination can only be achieved when both types are available. Of course, it would be absurd to suggest that early hominins huddled together and explicitly sorted things into categories to coordinate their concepts. However, the current results shed tight on the extent to which language may have revolutionised human cognition. Language does not seem to be crucial for conceptual coordination, but it does enhance it.

Note from Publisher: This article contains the abstract and references.