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.

当前的综述聚焦于语言输入（尤其是可数名词）如何影响各种认知任务的表现，这些认知任务包括个体化、分类和类别学习以及归纳推理。我们回顾了关于词汇影响的两种理论解释。一种解释的支持者认为，词汇对认知任务具有自上而下的影响，因此起到监督信号的作用。另一种解释的支持者则提出，在发展的早期，词汇就像任何其他感知特征一样，首先且最重要的是刺激输入的一部分，并以自下而上、非监督的方式影响认知任务。然后我们回顾了支持每种解释的证据。我们得出的结论是，尽管还需要大量的研究，但有大量证据表明，词汇在发展过程中起始时像其他感知特征，后来变成了监督信号。