Language unifies relational coding: The roles of label acquisition and accessibility in making flexible relational judgments

•We investigated the relation between verbal and nonverbal relational processing.•Accessing labels promoted relational coding in a nonverbal spatial task.•Early knowledge of the labels did not, by itself, improve nonverbal performance.•Any label may do: use of the correct label was not needed to improve performance.•Labels enhanced relational coding by helping one ignore irrelevant information.