Quantifying semantic animacy: How much are words alive?

Abstract

The main goal of this study, which comprised two experimental tasks and three normative studies, was to describe the underlying distribution of semantic animacy, with the focus on Serbian and English. Animacy was measured using three normative techniques. The cognitive effects of obtained measures were tested in two experiments conducted in both Serbian and English: a visual lexical decision task and a semantic categorization task. Results suggest that semantic animacy is a graded property. A high correlation between Serbian and English measures suggests that semantic animacy might be language independent, most likely because of its biological grounding. As for its behavioral correlates, animacy does not affect lexical decision times but it does codetermine the categorization speed: the category decision gradually slows as a function of the degree of animacy. These results were consistent across two languages under research scrutiny. We thus conclude that animacy is a continuous aspect of meaning.

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

“…As claimed by Radanović, Westbury, and Milin (2016), animacy is one of the basic semantic features of word meaning, and as briefly reviewed above, different views of semantic organization and processing attribute a processing advantage to animates over inanimates. In addition, because a processing advantage has been reported in the domains of perception, attention, and episodic memory, it is therefore of great importance to examine how this feature is activated in tasks indexing access to lexicosemantic knowledge.…”

“…Although the visual lexical decision task relies primarily on orthographic codes (Balota, Ferraro, & Connor, 1991;Izura & Hernández-Muñoz, 2017), it has often been used successfully to investigate semantic codes (e.g., Yap, Lim, & Pexman, 2015;Yap, Tan, Pexman, & Hargreaves, 2011). However, evidence for animacy effects in lexical decision is inconclusive (Radanović et al, 2016). According to Radanović et al (2016), the inconsistency of the findings concerning the impact of animacy in lexicosemantic tasks is thought to be due to the selection by researchers of specific categories of animate versus inanimate items (i.e., "the languageas-fixed-effect fallacy"; Clark, 1973).…”

“…However, evidence for animacy effects in lexical decision is inconclusive (Radanović et al, 2016). According to Radanović et al (2016), the inconsistency of the findings concerning the impact of animacy in lexicosemantic tasks is thought to be due to the selection by researchers of specific categories of animate versus inanimate items (i.e., "the languageas-fixed-effect fallacy"; Clark, 1973).…”

Occluding the face diminishes the conceptual accessibility of an animate agent

“…perform actions in the world)." Previous studies have elicited judgments about animacy by asking participants to rate the extent to which an entity is "alive" (Tremoulet & Feldman, 2000), or is "animate" (Radanović, Westbury, & Milin, 2016). We selected the instructions above in order to elicit a notion of animacy that distinguishes humans from plants (which are both alive), and because we were not confident that participants would have strong notions about the meaning of "animate" without any additional instruction.…”

Slavic Psycholinguistics in the 21st Century

“…Wagner and colleagues (2013) investigated phonotactic constraints that regulate consonant clusters in Polish. In psychosemantics, Slavic data have been used to study animacy in Serbian (Radanović, Westbury, and Milin 2016), comparative properties of quantifiers in Bulgarian and Polish (Tomaszewicz 2013), and quantifier scope in Russian (Ionin and Luchkina 2015;Sekerina and Sauermann 2015).…”