A direct replication and extension of Popp and Serra (2016, experiment 1): better free recall and worse cued recall of animal names than object names, accounting for semantic similarity.

Introduction: Free recall tends to be better for names of animate concepts such as animals than for names of inanimate objects. In Popp and Serra's 2016 article, the authors replicated this "animacy effect" in free recall but when participants studied words in pairs (animate-animate pairs intermixed with inanimate-inanimate pairs) and were tested with cued recall, performance was better for inanimate-inanimate pairs than for animate-animate pairs ("reverse animacy"). We tested the replicability of this surprising effect and one possible explanation for the effect (semantic similarity).