title: In the absence of animacy: superordinate category structure affects subordinate label verification.
abstract: Theoretical accounts as well as behavioral studies reporting animacy effects offer inconsistent and sometimes contradictory results. A possible explanation for these inconsistencies may be inadvertent biases in the stimuli selected for test - with category-specific effects driven by characteristics of test stimuli other than animacy per se. In this study, we pit animacy against feature structure (intra-item variability), in a picture-word matching task. For unimpaired adults, regardless of whether objects were from animate (mammals; insects) or inanimate (clothes; musical instruments) superordinate categories, participants were faster to match basic level labels with objects from categories with low intra-item variability (mammals; clothes) than from categories with high intra-item variability (insects; instruments). Thus, pitting animacy against variability allowed us to clarify that observable differences in processing speed between animals and instruments are systematically driven by the intra-item variability of the superordinate categories, and not by animacy itself.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia.
authors.forename: Olivera
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Ilic
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia.
authors.forename: Vanja
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Kovic
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom ; Division of Psychology, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore.
authors.forename: Suzy J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Styles
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D055815:Young Adult