“It is alive!” Evidence for animacy effects in semantic categorization and lexical decision

Abstract

Animacy is one of the basic semantic features of word meaning and influences perceptual and episodic memory processes. However, evidence that this variable also influences lexicosemantic processing is mixed. As animacy is a semantic variable thought to have evolutionary roots, we first examined its influence in a semantic categorization task that did not make the animacy dimension salient, namely, concrete-abstract categorization. Animates were categorized faster (and more accurately) than inanimates. We then assessed the influence of animacy in two lexical decision experiments. In Experiment 2, we mostly used legal nonwords, whereas in Experiment 3, we varied the context of the nonwords across participants in such a way that the discriminability between words and nonwords was either high or low. Animates yielded faster decision times than inanimates when legal nonwords were used (Experiment 2) and when the discriminability between words and nonwords was low (i.e., “difficult nonwords” in Experiment 3), but the difference between the two types of words was not reliable when discriminability was high (e.g., illegal strings of letters, i.e., “easy nonwords” in Experiment 3). The findings suggest that animacy is a core meaning-related dimension that influences a large number of processes involved in perception, episodic memory, and semantic memory.

Overcoming Pavlovian bias in semantic space

“…In our study, using animated animal stimuli may have facilitated the learning of individual conditions. Interestingly, a recent study showed that animacy facilitates semantic categorisation 50 , and this kind of interaction might explain why we observed a training effect only when animate stimuli and a semantic response domain were combined. The combination of these features in SS g+ may have enabled subjects to represent the different conditions more explicitly than in other versions of the valenced go/ no-go task.…”

Animacy enhances recollection but not familiarity: Convergent evidence from the remember-know-guess paradigm and the process-dissociation procedure

“…The results of Experiment 1 confirm the hypothesis derived from the richness-of-encoding account (Meinhardt et al, 2020 ) and the attentional account (Bugaiska et al, 2019 ) that animacy selectively enhances recollection. Even though animate words were encoded for a shorter period of time compared to inanimate words, animate words were more likely to be recollected than inanimate words (for a discussion of the relationship between response times and the richness of a word’s semantic representation, see Bonin et al, 2019 ). The animacy effect on the detection of new words was parallel to the animacy effect on the recollection of old words, as it should be (Glanzer & Adams, 1985 ).…”

Reflexiones en torno a la relación entre semántica del lenguaje y algunas operaciones intelectuales

“…La categorización es el proceso de distribución del objeto en una clase o categoría (Shadrikov, 2006). En el proceso de categorización, el conocimiento y las características semánticas son relevantes porque proporcionan una gran variedad de cualidades para el reconocimiento de palabras (Bonin et al, 2019).…”