The Role of Words in Cognitive Tasks: What, When, and How?

The current review focuses on how exposure to linguistic input, and count nouns in particular, affect performance on various cognitive tasks, including individuation, categorization and category learning, and inductive inference. We review two theoretical accounts of effects of words. Proponents of one account argue that words have top-down effects on cognitive tasks, and, as such, function as supervisory signals. Proponents of the other account suggest that early in development, words, just like any other perceptual feature, are first and foremost part of the stimulus input and influence cognitive tasks in a bottom-up, non-supervisory fashion. We then review evidence supporting each account. We conclude that, although much research is needed, there is a large body of evidence indicating that words start out like other perceptual features and become supervisory signals in the course of development.