Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Monolinguals and bilinguals differ along a number ofdimensions, including way they label existing objectcategories (Pavlenko & Malt, 2011). In the present study, weask whether English monolinguals, Spanish-Englishbilinguals, and English-Spanish bilinguals also differ in theway they use language when forming novel categories.Previous research with monolinguals shows that a sharedlabel encourages children (e.g., Waxman & Markow, 1995)and adults (e.g., Lupyan, Rakison, & McClelland, 2007) toplace objects together. Our results further demonstrate thatwhen two objects shared a Licit Word label like “zeg,”monolinguals and bilinguals alike are encouraged to groupthem together. Illicit Words like “gxz,” on the other hand,only influence the categorization decisions of bilinguals.Thus, bilinguals appear to be more flexible in their use oflinguistic information in categorization. Neither group madeuse of non-linguistic cues (patterned frames), suggesting aunique role for language in category formation.