AI Article Synopsis
- - The text discusses the significance of animacy as a word variable, especially in relation to episodic memory, and highlights the lack of normative data in existing literature.
- - A new normative dataset of 1,200 concrete nouns is introduced, assessed on 15 established dimensions and 6 new animacy dimensions, which include aspects like living/non-living classification and cognitive abilities.
- - Analysis indicates that the new animacy scales are distinct from other word variables and can be divided into two components: a "Mental" aspect relating to cognitive abilities and a "Physical" aspect linked to resemblance to living beings.
Article Abstract
Animacy is an important word variable (especially for episodic memory), yet no norms exist in the literature. We present a complete, usable normative data set of 1,200 relatively concrete nouns normed on 15 existing dimensions (concreteness, familiarity, imagery, availability, valence, arousal, dominance, age of acquisition, length, orthographic neighborhood, phonographic neighborhood, number of syllables, and subtitle frequency/contextual diversity) and six new animacy dimensions (a general living/non-living scale, ability to think, ability to reproduce, similarity to a person, goal-directedness, and movement likelihood). Principal component analysis of these 21 dimensions revealed that animacy scales were conceptually different from extant word variables. Further, factor analysis of the six new scales revealed these animacy norms may be separable into two dimensions: a "Mental" component related to animates' ability to think and have goals, and a "Physical" component related to animates' general resemblance to living things. These data provide useful theoretical insight into the structure of the animacy dimension, an important factor in many cognitive processes. The norms are accessible at https://osf.io/4t3cu .
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01266-y | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Article Synopsis
- Some object concepts are more memorable than others due to features and typicality, but the exact reasons remain unclear.
- This study investigates whether the geometric organization of object concepts in hierarchical structures affects their memorability, using Hyperbolic representation spaces to analyze a large dataset of images.
- Findings indicate that concepts positioned closer to the center of the representation space are more typical and memorable, with Hyperbolic geometry providing better predictions for both memorability and typicality compared to traditional Euclidean methods.
Zooming in and out of semantics: proximal-distal construal levels and prominence hierarchies.
Front Psychol
September 2024
Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
We argue that the "Prominence Hierarchy" within linguistics can be subsumed under the "Construal Level Theory" within psychology and that a wide spectrum of grammatical phenomena, ranging from case assignment to number, definiteness, verbal agreement, voice, direct/inverse morphology, and syntactic word-order respond to Prominence Hierarchies (PH), or semantic scales. In fact, the field of prominence hierarchies, as expressed through the languages of the world, continues to be riddled with riddles. We identify a set of conundrums: (A) vantage point and animacy, (B) individuation and narrow reference phenomena, (C) fronting mechanisms, (D) abstraction, and (E) cultural variance and flexibility.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFI like the way you move: how animate motion affects visual attention in early human infancy.
Front Neurosci
August 2024
Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
The ability to detect animates (as compared with inanimates) rapidly is advantageous for human survival. Due to its relevance, not only the adult human brain has evolved specific neural mechanisms to discriminate animates, but it has been proposed that selection finely tuned the human visual attention system to prioritize visual cues that signal the presence of living things. Among them, animate motion-i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhat eye and hand movements tell us about expectations towards argument order: An eye- and mouse-tracking study in German.
Acta Psychol (Amst)
June 2024
Department of Language and Culture, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø 9037, Norway; Department of Language and Literature, NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim 7491, Norway.
Article Synopsis
- Previous research indicates that in German, listeners use morphological cues of accusative case to identify the object of a sentence and anticipate the agent involved.
- The current study investigates how case marking helps predict the roles of subsequent arguments in both transitive and ditransitive sentence structures.
- Findings show that the first case cue's effectiveness in interpreting sentences is affected by how expected the argument order is and how noticeable the case cue is to the listener.
Children extract a new linguistic rule more quickly than adults.
Dev Sci
July 2024
Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
Children achieve better long-term language outcomes than adults. However, it remains unclear whether children actually learn language more quickly than adults during real-time exposure to input-indicative of true superior language learning abilities-or whether this advantage stems from other factors. To examine this issue, we compared the rate at which children (8-10 years) and adults extracted a novel, hidden linguistic rule, in which novel articles probabilistically predicted the animacy of associated nouns (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!