What have labels ever done for us? The linguistic shortcut in conceptual processing

Abstract

How does language affect cognition? Is it important that most of our concepts come with linguistic labels, such as car or number? The statistical distributions of how such labels co-occur in language offers a rich medium of associative information that can support conceptual processing in a number of ways. In this article, I argue that the role of language in conceptual processing goes far beyond mere support, and that language is as fundamental and intrinsic a part of conceptual processing as sensorimotor-affective simulations. In particular, because linguistic association tends to be computationally cheaper than simulation (i.e., faster, less effortful, but still information-rich), it enables an heuristic mechanism that can provide adequate conceptual representation without the need to develop a detailed simulation. I review the evidence for this key mechanism -the linguistic shortcut -and propose that it allows labels to sometimes carry the burden of conceptual processing by acting in place of simulated referent meanings, according to context, available resources, and processing goals.Keywords: concepts, language, representation, linguistic distributional information, simulation LABELS IN CONCEPTUAL PROCESSING 3 What Have Labels Ever Done For Us? The Linguistic Shortcut in Conceptual ProcessingAll right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? (Life of Brian: Goldstone & Jones, 1979) A concept in long-term memory is an aggregate of experience that receives frequent attention and can be re-activated relatively easily in offline processing as an instantiated representation of the concept 1 (e.g., Connell & Lynott, 2014b). We mentally represent things that are present in the environment during online processing of real-world perception and action, and can represent them again in their absence during offline remembering, planning, and daydreaming (Wilson, 2002). As such, it seems reasonable that attaching a linguistic label to a particular aspect of experience could make it easier to perform some conceptual tasks, such as acquiring concepts like object kinds (Xu, 2002) and numbers (Carey, 2004), shaping the boundaries between colour categories (Winawer et al., 2007), or influencing how easily a visual feature or object is detected (Lupyan & Ward, 2013). Attaching a label to a bundle of experience may allow us to attend to it more easily in online processing, re-activate it more easily in offline processing, and hence help it cohere into a concept by assisting with abstraction (i.e., moving from a specific instance of sensorimotor experience to a generalised, aggregate form). However, the possibilities regarding language's role in cognition are more far-reaching than assisting concept learning or online perception. Rather than being peripheral to the "real" concept at hand and playing a supporting role in cognition, language could instead be an integral part of the...

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