Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Classic work on categorization has documented a robust preference for basic-level over superordinate labels, shaped by multiple factors including conceptual organization and pragmatic expectations of informativeness. However, it remains unclear whether similar expectations guide the evaluation of verb descriptions, whose semantic organization is less taxonomically stable and more context-dependent. In two experiments, we investigated adults' pragmatic evaluation of basic-level versus superordinate verbs. Experiment 1 showed that superordinate verbs (e.g., in "a woman is moving") were systematically rated lower relative to basic-level alternatives (running) when describing actions, despite being literally true. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this penalty was modulated by contextual relevance: superordinate verbs were judged more acceptable when visual contrast rendered them informative for identifying the target action, but remained dispreferred overall. These findings indicate that pragmatic expectations of informativeness extend to the verbal domain, while highlighting constraints imposed by conventional event construal and the flexible nature of verb abstraction.