Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Novel labels provide feedback that may enhance categoricalalignment between interlocutors. However, the nature of thisfeedback may not always be linguistic. Lupyan (2008) hasdemonstrated the effects of labels on individualcategorization, and even non-word labels have seeminglyproduced greater consistency in sorting strategies (Lupyan &Casasanto, 2014). We extend this to alignment bydemonstrating that arbitrary labels can increase sortingconsistency to bring people’s categories closer together, evenwithout dialogue. Importantly, we argue that increasedalignment is not always due to labeling in a linguistic sense.Results suggest that it is not the content of the non-wordlabels driving the alignment effects, but the very presence ofthe labels acting as ‘anchors’ for category formation. Thisdemonstrates a more general cognitive effect of arbitrarylabels on categorization.