VERBAL LABELS INCREASE CONCEPTUAL ALIGNMENT

Successful linguistic communication requires conversants to mean at least approximately the same thing by the same words. But how is this alignment achieved? One possibility is that participants have pre-existing concepts to which verbal labels are mapped. Alignment is then a matter of ensuring that in members of the same speech community, the same word points to the same concept. But how do the underlying conceptual representations become aligned in the first place? One source of alignment is shared sensory experiences mediated by similar perceptual systems. But is this enough? We test the possibility that language itself serves to align conceptual representations. Participants were asked to sort novel shapes and we measured the similarity between people’s sorts. By separately manipulating previous perceptual experience with the shapes, and exposure to (entirely redundant) category labels, we tested (1) the role of shared perceptual experience and (2) the effect of labels on representational alignment. The results showed that shared experience with labels increased representational alignment more than shared perceptual experience alone. We consider the implications of this finding for the cognitive functions of language and for how language may be used to enable coordination in the face of non-shared perceptual experiences.