Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The basic-level advantage is one of the best-known effects in human categorisation. Traditional accounts argue that basic-level categories present a maximally informative or entry-level into a taxonomic organisation of concepts in semanticmemory. However, these explanations are not fully compatible with most recent views on the structure of the concep-tual system, which emphasise the role of sensorimotor (i.e., perception-action experience of the world) and linguisticinformation (i.e., statistical distribution of words in language) in conceptual processing. In a pre-registered wordpicturecategorisation study, we hypothesised that our novel measures of sensorimotor and linguistic distance would contribute tocategorical decision making, and would outperform traditional taxonomic levels (i.e., subordinate, basic, superordinate)in predicting the basic-level advantage. Results showed that, overall, our measures predicted the basic-level advantage atleast as well as taxonomic level. Sensorimotor information best explained processing speed, whereas taxonomic level bestexplained participants choices.