Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated the contribution of sensorimotor and linguistic distributional information in a semantic category produc-tion task, hypothesizing that the task would rely on both but particularly on linguistic distributional information, whichmay provide a shortcut for conceptual processing. In a pre-registered study, we asked participants to name members ofsemantic categories and tested whether responses were predicted by a novel measure of sensorimotor proximity (based onan 11-dimension representation of sensorimotor experience) and linguistic proximity (based on word co-occurrence de-rived from a large subtitle corpus). Both proximity measures predicted the order and frequency of responses and, critically,linguistic proximity had an effect above and beyond sensorimotor proximity. Our findings support linguistic-sensorimotoraccounts of the conceptual system and suggest that category production is based on both the similarity of sensorimotor ex-perience between the category and member concepts, and on the linguistic distributional relationship between the categoryand member labels.