Animacy Effects Research Articles

Facial animacy in anthropomorphised designs: Insights from leveraging self-report and facial expression analysis for multimedia learning

Anthropomorphism is the act of attributing human-like characteristics to non-human objects and has played a key role in the field of emotional design in multimedia learning. Despite its significance, the relationship between animacy and anthropomorphism, particularly facial animacy, remains underexplored albeit its potential impact on learning engagement and emotional responses. Hence, this study aims to address this gap by examining the effects of facial animacy in anthropomorphised designs using a 3 × 2 design (none vs. static vs. animated) based on self-reported measure (SRM) and facial emotion recognition (FER) and how both measures are associated. The findings revealed discrepancies between both measures, with mostly moderate to weak correlations between hypothesised associations. SRM results indicated that face animacy decreased perceived boredom, while static and dynamic anthropomorphised designs increased curiosity. The FER results revealed notable similarities between designs without anthropomorphism and the static versions, highlighting that facial animacy led participants to express more joy and less neutral expressions. Additionally, neutral expressions were associated with lower enjoyment perception, while negative emotions, especially boredom, were linked to reduced attention.

L2 Spanish clitics among Brazilian Portuguese-speaking learners: the predictive role of lexical knowledge

We examined the acquisition of third-person accusative clitics (e.g., lo, la, los, las) in L2 Spanish among Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers. In BP, the animacy of the referent is the main feature constraining accusative pronoun use while, in Spanish, animacy does not affect clitic realization. We tested Lardiere’s (2008; 2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH), Schwartz & Sprouse’s (1996) Full Transfer/Full Access hypothesis (FT/FA), and the suitability of productive vocabulary knowledge as a proxy for overall proficiency and its predictive power for the acquisition of clitics. 74 BP-speaking L2 Spanish learners and a comparison group of 23 native Spanish speakers completed a language background questionnaire, a vocabulary test (Prueba Léxica de Español y Portugués/Prova Léxica de Espanhol e Português, PLEP), an elicited production task, and an acceptability judgment task. Only the L2 Spanish participants completed the tasks in both languages. Our findings are consistent with the FRH, showing that the participants successfully disassemble animacy features from their L1 when acquiring the non-animacy-driven clitics in Spanish. However, animacy effects were found in the L2 production data but not in their receptive grammatical knowledge. Furthermore, animacy effects were not dependent on proficiency as no interactions between these factors were found, thus rejecting the existence of a full transfer stage.

Automatic imitation is modulated by stimulus clarity but not by animacy

Observing actions evokes an automatic imitative response that activates mechanisms required to execute these actions. Automatic imitation is measured using the Stimulus Response Compatibility (SRC) task, which presents participants with compatible and incompatible prompt-distractor pairs. Automatic imitation, or the compatibility effect, is the difference in response times (RTs) between incompatible and compatible trials. Past results suggest that an action’s animacy affects automatic imitation: human-produced actions evoke larger effects than computer-generated actions. However, it appears that animacy effects occur mostly when non-human stimuli are less complex or less clear. Theoretical accounts make conflicting predictions regarding both stimulus manipulations. We conducted two SRC experiments that presented participants with an animacy manipulation (human and computer-generated stimuli, Experiment 1) and a clarity manipulation (stimuli with varying visual clarity using Gaussian blurring, Experiments 1 and 2) to tease apart effect of these manipulations. Participants in Experiment 1 responded slower for incompatible than for compatible trials, showing a compatibility effect. Experiment 1 found a null effect of animacy, but stimuli with lower visual clarity evoked smaller compatibility effects. Experiment 2 modulated clarity in five steps and reports decreasing compatibility effects for stimuli with lower clarity. Clarity, but not animacy, therefore affected automatic imitation, and theoretical implications and future directions are considered.

Ordering preferences in Ukrainian multiple <i>wh</i>-fronting

We present the first systematic study of ordering restrictions in Ukrainian multiple wh-fronting (MWF) constructions, examining the effects of grammatical relation, case and animacy. Using an acceptability judgment task with pair-list primes, we tested the acceptability of Superiority-obeying and Superiority-violating questions with two wh-arguments. We found that Ukrainian speakers exhibit two distinct patterns with respect to Superiority: one group of speakers accepted Superiority violations while the other did not. Both groups, however, allowed free word order with wh-prepositional phrases and the lexical item ščo ‘what’. We conclude that these two patterns represent two distinct varieties of Ukrainian which differ in Superiority in matrix MWF constructions.

Manipulations of richness of encoding do not modulate the animacy effect on memory.

The animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of words denoting animate beings over words denoting inanimate objects. Remembering animate beings may serve important evolutionary functions, but the cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect has remained elusive. According to the richness-of-encoding account, animate words stimulate participants to generate more ideas than inanimate words at encoding. These ideas may later serve as retrieval cues and thus enhance recall. There is as yet only correlational evidence associating rich encoding and the animacy advantage in memory. To experimentally test the assumption that richness of encoding plays a causal role, we examined whether the animacy effect can be modulated by facilitating or suppressing rich encoding. In Experiment 1, richness of encoding was manipulated by requiring participants to write down four ideas or one idea in response to animate and inanimate words. In Experiment 2, the one-idea-generation condition was compared to an unrestricted-idea-generation condition. In Experiment 3, the unrestricted-idea-generation condition was compared to a distractor-task condition in which the idea-generation process was suppressed. In Experiment 4, richness of encoding was manipulated by asking participants to rate the relevance of the words for achieving three survival-related goals or one survival-related goal. Animate words were better remembered than inanimate words. In three of the four experiments, rich encoding led to improved recall. However, none of the manipulations of richness of encoding affected the animacy effect on memory, demonstrating its robustness irrespective of the encoding conditions. These results weaken the richness-of-encoding account of the animacy effect on memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A processing advantage in favor of animate entities in incidental word learning in young children

Because of their evolutionary importance, it has been proposed that animate entities would be better remembered than inanimate entities. Although a growing body of evidence supports this hypothesis, it is still unclear whether the animacy effect persists under incidental learning conditions. Furthermore, few studies have tested the robustness of this effect in young children, with conflicting results. Using an incidental learning paradigm, we investigated whether young children (4- and 5-year-olds) would be better at learning words that refer to either human or animal entities rather than vehicle entities using pictures as stimuli. A sample of 79 children were asked to play digital Memory games while associations between pictures and words were presented incidentally. Consistent with the adaptive view of memory, the results showed that words associated with human and animal entities were better learned incidentally than words associated with vehicle entities. The visual complexity of the pictures did not influence this animacy effect. In addition, the more exposure to the pictures, the more incidental learning occurred. Overall, the results confirm the robustness of the animacy effect and show that this processing advantage can be found in an incidental learning task in children as young as 4 or 5 years. Furthermore, it is the first study to show that this effect can be obtained with pictures in children. The demonstration of the animacy effect with pictures, and not just words, is a prerequisite for an ultimate explanation of this effect in terms of survival.

Clitics, DOM and ellipsis

This paper discusses the correlation between clitics, DOM and ellipsis in Spanish. As observed by Cyrino & Ordóñez (2018), strict and sloppy readings can be obtained in both TP ellipsis and argument ellipsis with clitics. However, DOM animate antecedents severely limit the availability of sloppy readings in argument ellipsis with clitics. This is a new observation, and judgments about the lack of sloppy readings is often delicate. We carried out an experimental study in order to confirm the data reported in Cyrino & Ordóñez (2018). We also wanted to test whether this distinction applied to speakers of three different dialects of Spanish where distribution of clitics and doubling differs. The results show a significant statistical anti animacy effect for obtaining sloppy readings with clitics. This effect is not found with TP ellipsis. In this paper we propose a syntactic approach to account for such effect with clitics. We propose that clitics contain an empty doubled (see also Bošković 2018). We propose an analysis based on the idea that DOM objects are moved out of the vP and that the doubled DOM KP undergoes vehicle change to become a pronoun in the case of argument ellipsis.

Literacy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German children and adult speakers of German and Arabic.

Animacy plays a key role for human cognition, which is also reflected in the way humans process language. However, while experiments on sentence processing show reliable effects of animacy on word order and grammatical function assignment, effects of animacy on conjoined noun phrases (e.g., fish and shoe vs. shoe and fish) have yielded inconsistent results. In the present study, we tested the possibility that effects of animacy are outranked by reading and writing habits. We examined adult speakers of German (left-to-right script) and speakers of Arabic (right-to-left script), as well as German preschool children who do not yet know how to read and write. Participants were tested in a picture naming task that presented an animate and an inanimate entity next to one another. On half of the trials, the animate entity was located on the left and, on the other half, it was located on the right side of the screen. We found that adult German and Arabic speakers differed in their order of naming. Whereas German speakers were much more likely to mention the animate entity first when it was presented on the left than on the right, a reverse tendency was observed for speakers of Arabic. Thus, in literate adults, the ordering of conjoined noun phrases was influenced by reading and writing habits rather than by the animacy status of an entity. By contrast, pre-literate children preferred to start their utterances with the animate entity regardless of position, suggesting that effects of animacy in adults have been overwritten by effects of literacy.

Animacy effects in the English genitive alternation: comparing native speakers and EFL learner judgments with corpus data

Abstract Recent years have seen a heightened interest in the interface between language use and cognition in language learners. In this study, we investigate this interface further by conducting a rating task experiment on the intuitions of 25 native speakers and 101 low–intermediate to advanced learners of English as a Foreign Language regarding the acceptability of the genitive variants (the beauty of nature/nature’s beauty) in different contexts. These ratings were then compared against existing corpus-based statistical models that predict which variant is most likely in spoken language use with two mixed-effects linear regression models. The first model focused on the animacy of the possessor in particular, which has been found to have a different effect on native speakers and EFL learners in language use, whereas the second model tested how the ratings relate to the predictions as a whole. Results show that there is a larger discrepancy between language use and intuitions of low-proficiency learners compared to native speakers, which is partially because animate, collective, and inanimate possessors affect the intuitions and the language use of learners differently.

The breadth of animacy in memory: New evidence from prospective memory

Studies using retrospective memory tasks have revealed that animates/living beings are better remembered than are inanimates/nonliving things (the animacy effect). However, considering that memory is foremost future oriented, we hypothesized that the animacy effect would also occur in prospective memory (i.e., memory for future intentions). Using standard prospective memory (PM) procedures, we explored this hypothesis by manipulating the animacy status of the PM targets. Study 1a reports data collected from an American sample; these results were then replicated with a Portuguese sample (Study 1b). Study 2 employed a new procedure, and data were collected from a broader English-speaking sample. In these three studies, animate (vs. inanimate) targets consistently led to a better PM performance, revealing, for the first time, that the animacy advantage extends to PM. These results strengthen the adaptive approach to memory and stress the need to consider animacy as an important variable in memory studies.

A Corpus Analysis of the Effects of Definiteness and Animacy on Word Order Variation

This article deals with the analysis of word order variation regarding subjects, direct objects, and non-direct object phrases called the “Target” in the corpus of languages of northwestern Iran, viz., Armenian, Mukri Kurdish, and Northeastern Kurdish (Indo-European), Jewish Northeastern Neo-Aramaic (Semitic), and Azeri Turkic (Turkic). The objective is to examine the effects of formal and semantic (in)definiteness in combination with animacy on Target word order variation to find out which one can be a triggering factor.

The Role of Animacy in Turkish Relative Clause Production and Distribution.

Relative clause (RC) production has been a major tool used for understanding language production mechanism in experimental linguistics. The present study analyzes language production mechanisms in Turkish by utilizing animacy effect on RC production. A picture description task was applied to two participant groups. The data were combined and analyzed to see how animacy influenced RC formation. The outcomes were also compared to the distributions of RC use in corpus data. Both participant and corpus data demonstrated significant level of passivization for RCs with animate heads, strongly affirming the grammatical function assignment proposal by Bock and Warren (Cognition 21(1):47-67, 1985) as well as the premise of Production-Distribution-Comprehension account (MacDonald in Front Psychol 4:226, 2013), emphasizing the relationship between language production mechanisms and typology. However, the corpus data were observed to have higher numbers of passivization with animate condition. Accordingly, a coarse comparison of the participant RC production proportions in the current study with some other crosslinguistic research suggests that some language-specific or discourse-related interventions can also compete with the animacy accessibility during the sentence planning procedure, which needs an extra inquiry especially in Turkish language.

Effects of Robot Animacy and Emotional Expressions on Perspective-Taking Abilities: A Comparative Study across Age Groups.

The global population is inevitably aging due to increased life expectancy and declining birth rates, leading to an amplified demand for innovative social and healthcare services. One promising avenue is the introduction of companion robots. These robots are designed to provide physical assistance as well as emotional support and companionship, necessitating effective human-robot interaction (HRI). This study explores the role of cognitive empathy within HRI, focusing on the influence of robot facial animacy and emotional expressions on perspective-taking abilities-a key aspect of cognitive empathy-across different age groups. To this end, a director task involving 60 participants (30 young and 30 older adults) with varying degrees of robot facial animacy (0%, 50%, 100%) and emotional expressions (happy, neutral) was conducted. The results revealed that older adults displayed enhanced perspective-taking with higher animacy faces. Interestingly, while happiness on high-animacy faces improved perspective-taking, the same expression on low-animacy faces reduced it. These findings highlight the importance of considering facial animacy and emotional expressions in designing companion robots for older adults to optimize user engagement and acceptance. The study's implications are pertinent to the design and development of socially effective service robots, particularly for the aging population.

Wolf-hound vs. sled-dog: neurolinguistic evidence for semantic decomposition in the recognition of German noun-noun compounds.

Animacy is an intrinsic semantic property of words referring to living things. A long line of evidence shows that words with animate referents require lower processing costs during word recognition than words with inanimate referents, leading among others to a decreased N400 amplitude in reaction to animate relative to inanimate objects. In the current study, we use this animacy effect to provide evidence for access to the semantic properties of constituents in German noun-noun compounds. While morphological decomposition of noun-noun compounds is well-researched and illustrated by the robust influence of lexical constituent properties like constituent length and frequency, findings for semantic decomposition are less clear in the current literature. By manipulating the animacy of compound modifiers and heads, we are able to manipulate the relative ease of lexical access strictly due to intrinsic semantic properties of the constituents. Our results show additive effects of constituent animacy, with a higher number of animate constituents leading to gradually attenuated N400 amplitudes. We discuss the implications of our findings for current models of complex word recognition, as well as stimulus construction practices in psycho-and neurolinguistic research.

The Effects of Word Frequency, Age of Acquisition, Animacy, and Grammatical Class on Picture Naming by Volunteers and People with Aphasia

ABSTRACT Background Numerous studies have investigated the effects of word frequency (WF), age of acquisition (AoA), and animacy on picture naming in volunteers and those with aphasia. But none have controlled for any possible interactions among these three variables during noun retrieval and whether WF and AoA influence verb retrieval in ways that are similar to that observed during noun retrieval. Aims The main purpose of this study was to examine the influences of WF, AoA, and animacy on noun retrieval in both volunteers and participants with aphasia and to compare these results to the effects of AoA and WF in both groups during verb retrieval. Methods and Procedures A factorial approach was used to study the effects of (a) WF, AoA, and animacy on picture naming for 249 nouns, and (b) the effects of WF and AoA on picture naming for 88 verbs. Fifteen volunteers with no history of neurologic or psychiatric impairment and 13 people with aphasia participated in this study. Naming latencies using key press procedures were used to assess the effects of the independent variables. Linear mixed effects with random intercepts were modeled to analyze the results. Outcomes and Results Nouns with early AoA and high WF were named significantly faster than all nouns with late AoA. There were no differences between naming speeds for animate vs. inanimate nouns. Animate nouns with early AoA and high frequency were named significantly faster than early, animate nouns with low frequency. Low word frequency facilitated naming by the participants with aphasia for early AoA verbs but slowed the volunteers’ naming for these verbs. Participants responded significantly faster to nouns versus verbs regardless of AoA and WF. Conclusions Controlling for animacy in noun picture naming produces novel findings regarding the effects of WF and AoA on word retrieval. The interaction among WF, AoA, and animacy is more consequential for picture naming speed than the specific effects of any one of these variables alone.

Better together: integrating multivariate with univariate methods, and MEG with EEG to study language comprehension

ABSTRACT We used MEG and EEG to examine the effects of Plausibility (anomalous vs. plausible) and Animacy (animate vs. inanimate) on activity to incoming words during language comprehension. We conducted univariate event-related and multivariate spatial similarity analyses on both datasets. The univariate and multivariate results converged in their time course and sensitivity to Plausibility. However, only the spatial similarity analyses detected effects of Animacy. The MEG and EEG findings largely converged between 300–500 ms, but diverged in their univariate and multivariate responses to anomalies between 600–1000 ms. We interpret the full set of results within a predictive coding framework. In addition to the theoretical significance, we discuss the methodological implications of the convergence and divergence between the univariate and multivariate results, as well as between the MEG and EEG results. We argue that a deeper understanding of language processing can be achieved by integrating different analysis approaches and techniques.

Does animacy affect visual statistical learning? Revisiting the effects of selective attention and animacy on visual statistical learning.

Animates receive preferential attentional processing over inanimates because, from an evolutionary perspective, animates are important to human survival. We investigated whether animacy affects visual statistical learning-the detection and extraction of regularities in visual information from our rich, dynamic, and complex environment. Participants completed a selective-attention task, in which regularities were embedded in two visual streams, an attended and an unattended visual stream. The attended visual stream always consisted of line-drawings of non-objects, while the unattended visual stream consisted of line-drawings of either animates or inanimates. Participants then completed a triplet-discrimination task, which assessed their ability to extract regularities from the attended and unattended visual streams. We also assessed participants' awareness of regularities in the visual statistical learning task, and asked if any learning strategies were used. We were specifically interested in whether the animacy status of line-drawings in the unattended visual stream would affect visual statistical learning. There were four key findings. First, selective attention modulates visual statistical learning, with greater visual statistical learning for attended than for unattended information. Second, animacy does not affect visual statistical learning, with no differences found in visual statistical learning performance between the animate and inanimate condition. Third, awareness of regularities was associated with visual statistical learning of attended information. Fourth, participants used strategies (e.g., naming or labelling stimuli) during the visual statistical learning task. Further research is required to understand whether visual statistical learning is one of the adaptive functions that evolved from ancestral environments.

Supplemental Material for Manipulations of Richness of Encoding Do Not Modulate the Animacy Effect on Memory

Supplemental Material for Manipulations of Richness of Encoding Do Not Modulate the Animacy Effect on Memory

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.

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). Our Experiment 1 was a preregistered direct replication (N = 101) of Popp and Serra's Experiment 1 (mixed-lists condition). In a second preregistered experiment conducted in four different samples (undergraduate N = 153, undergraduate N = 143, online Prolific N = 101, online Prolific/English-as-a-first-language N = 150), we manipulated the within-category semantic similarity of animal and object wordlists. AIn Experiment 1, just as in Popp and Serra, we observed an animacy effect for free recall and a reverse animacy effect for cued recall. Unlike Popp and Serra, we found that controlling for interference effects rendered the reverse animacy effect non-significant. We took this as evidence that characteristics of the stimulus sets (e.g., category structure, within-category similarity) may play a role in animacy and reverse animacy effects. In Experiment 2, in three out of our four samples, we observed reverse animacy effects when within-category similarity was higher for animals and when within-category similarity was equated for animals and objects. Our results suggest that the reverse animacy effect observed in Popp and Serra's 2016 article is a robust and replicable effect, but that semantic similarity alone cannot explain the effect.

The animacy advantage in memory occurs under self-paced study conditions, but participants' metacognitive beliefs can deter it.

Animacy distinguishes living (animate) things from non-living (inanimate) things. People tend to devote attention and processing to living over nonliving things, resulting in a privileged status for animate concepts in human cognition. For example, people tend to remember more animate than inanimate items, a phenomenon known as the "animacy effect" or "animacy advantage." To date, however, the exact cause(s) of this effect is unknown. We examined the animacy advantage in free-recall performance under computer-paced versus self-paced study conditions and using three different sets of animate and inanimate stimuli (Experiments 1 and 2). We also measured participants' metacognitive beliefs (expectations) about the task before it began (Experiment 2). We consistently obtained an animacy advantage in free-recall, regardless of whether participants studied the materials under computer-paced or self-paced conditions. Those in self-paced conditions spent less time studying items than did those in computer-paced conditions, but overall levels of recall and the occurrence of the animacy advantage were equivalent by study method. Importantly, participants devoted equivalent study time to animate and inanimate items in self-paced conditions, so the animacy advantage in those conditions cannot be attributed to study time differences. In Experiment 2, participants who believed that inanimate items were more memorable instead showed equivalent recall and study time for animate and inanimate items, suggesting that they engaged in equivalent processing of animate and inanimate items. All three sets of materials reliably produced an animacy advantage, but the effect was consistently larger for one set than the other two, indicating some contribution of item-level properties to the effect. Overall, the results suggest that participants do not purposely allocate greater processing to animate over inanimate items, even when study is self-paced. Rather, animate items seem to naturally trigger greater richness of encoding than do inanimate items and are then better remembered, although under some conditions participants might engage in deeper processing of inanimate items which can reduce or eliminate the animacy advantage. We suggest that researchers might conceptualize mechanisms for the effect as either centering on intrinsic, item-level properties of the items or centering on extrinsic, processing-based differences between animate and inanimate items.