Referential communication and category acquisition

Explanations of category coherence include that categories reflect feature correlations in the world, that the human conceptual system is designed to create systematic categories, and that people have theories about the world that bind together seemingly unrelated features. The authors have suggeste d that the need to establish reference in communication also influences cat egory coherence. This proposal was tested in 2 studies involving a referent ial communication task. In these studies, consistency was promoted between individuals by communication, which synchronized the category structures of different people. Further, people were focused on the commonalities of obj ects and an the differences related to the commonalities by communication-a pattern that is compatible with what has been observed in existing categor ies. These results suggest that categorization research must incorporate co mmunication tasks into the canon of methodologies used to study category st ructure.