In this experiment we created the conditions for the emergence of a division in a cognitive task, mediated by language, instantiated in an image classification task. Participants received points for correctly labeling dogs. Accurate labeling required participants to draw distinctions between two pairs of highly confusable pairs of breeds: Norwich vs Cairn Terrier, and Irish Wolfhound vs Scottish Deerhound. Half of the participants were in a solo condition in which they had to label the breeds on their own. The other half of participants were in a paired condition in which one participant was trained to distinguish between the two terriers while the other participant was trained to distinguish between the two hounds. After training, paired participants could ask their partner whether a label was correctly assigned to a dog image that they were tasked with labeling. We were interested in how a participants’ perceived understanding of the dog breeds was affected jointly by their own independent ability to label dogs of different breeds, and by their being embedded in a dyadic micro-community in which their paired partner either did or did not know how to label breeds.