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Quantifying semantic animacy: How much are words alive?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 March 2016

JELENA RADANOVIĆ ,
CHRIS WESTBURY  and
PETAR MILIN
JELENA RADANOVIĆ*
Affiliation:
University of Novi Sad
CHRIS WESTBURY
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
PETAR MILIN
Affiliation:
University of Novi Sad and Eberhard Karls University Tübingen
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Jelena Radanović, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Philosophy, Dr Zorana Đinđića 2, Novi Sad 21000, Serbia. E-mail: [email protected]
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 37 , Issue 6 , November 2016 , pp. 1477 - 1499
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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