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It is often assumed that how we talk about the world matters a great deal. This is one reason why conceptual engineers seek to improve our linguistic practices by advocating novel uses of our words, or by inventing new ones altogether. A core idea shared by conceptual engineers is that by changing our language in this way, we can reap all sorts of cognitive and practical benefits, such as improving our theorizing, combating hermeneutical injustice, or promoting social emancipation. But how do changes at the linguistic level translate into any of these worthwhile benefits? In this paper, we propose the nameability account as a novel answer to this question. More specifically, we argue that what linguistic resources are readily available to us directly affects our cognitive performance on various categorization‐related tasks. Consequently, our performance on such tasks can be improved by making controlled changes to our linguistic resources. We argue that this account supports and extends recent motivations for conceptual engineering, as categorization plays an important role in both theoretical and practical contexts. 

It is commonly assumed that inner speech—the experience of thought as occurring in a natural language—is a human universal. Recent evidence, however, suggests that the experience of inner speech in adults varies from near constant to nonexistent. We propose a name for a lack of the experience of inner speech—anendophasia—and report four studies examining some of its behavioral consequences. We found that adults who reported low levels of inner speech ( N = 46) had lower performance on a verbal working memory task and more difficulty performing rhyme judgments compared with adults who reported high levels of inner speech ( N = 47). Task-switching performance—previously linked to endogenous verbal cueing—and categorical effects on perceptual judgments were unrelated to differences in inner speech. 

In a recent paper, Aceves and Evans computed information and semantic density measures for hun- dreds of languages, and showed that these measures predict the pace and breadth of ideas in com- munication. Here, we summarize their key findings and situate them in a broader debate about the adap- tive nature of language. 

What determines whether two people represent something in a similar way? We examined the role of verbal labels in promoting representational alignment. Across two experiments, three groups of participants sorted novel shapes from two visually dissimilar categories. Prior to sorting, participants in two of the groups were pre-exposed to the shapes using a simple visual matching task designed to reinforce the visual category structure. In one of these groups, participants additionally heard one of two nonsense category labels accompanying the shapes. Exposure to these redundant labels led people to represent the shapes in a more categorical way, which led to greater alignment between sorters. We found this effect of label-induced alignment despite the two categories being highly visually distinct and despite participants in both pre-exposure conditions receiving identical visual experience with the shapes. Experiment 2 replicated this basic result using more even more stringent testing conditions. The results hint at the possibly extensive role that labels may play in aligning people’s mental representations. 

Abstract What makes a word easy to learn? Early‐learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We operationalized predictability in terms of a word's surprisal in child‐directed speech, computed using n‐gram and long‐short‐term‐memory (LSTM) language models. Predictability derived from LSTMs was generally a better predictor than predictability derived from n‐gram models. Across five languages, average surprisal was positively correlated with the AoA of predicates and function words but not nouns. Controlling for concreteness and word frequency, more predictable predicates and function words were learned earlier. Differences in predictability between languages were associated with cross‐linguistic differences in AoA: the same word (when it was a predicate) was produced earlier in languages where the word was more predictable. 

Abstract There are towns in which language-of-thought (LoT) is the best game. But do we live in one? I go through three properties that characterize the LoT hypothesis: Discrete constituents, role-filler independence, and logical operators, and argue that in each case predictions from the LoT hypothesis are a poor fit to actual human cognition. As a hypothesis of what human cognition ought to be like, LoT departs from empirical reality. 

Abstract Across languages, words carve up the world of experience in different ways. For example, English lacks an equivalent to the Chinese superordinate noun tiáowèipǐn, which is loosely translated as “ingredients used to season food while cooking.” Do such differences matter? A conventional label may offer a uniquely effective way of communicating. On the other hand, lexical gaps may be easily bridged by the compositional power of language. After all, most of the ideas we want to express do not map onto simple lexical forms. We conducted a referential Director/Matcher communication task with adult speakers of Chinese and English. Directors provided a clue that Matchers used to select words from a word grid. The three target words corresponded to a superordinate term (e.g., beverages) in either Chinese or English but not both. We found that Matchers were more accurate at choosing the target words when their language lexicalized the target category. This advantage was driven entirely by the Directors’ use/non-use of the intended superordinate term. The presence of a conventional superordinate had no measurable effect on speakers’ within- or between-category similarity ratings. These results show that the ability to rely on a conventional term is surprisingly important despite the flexibility languages offer to communicate about non-lexicalized categories.