Why are human animacy judgments continuous rather than categorical? A computational modeling approach

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

The concept of animacy is often taken as a basic natural concept, in part I because most cases seem unambiguous. Most entities either are or are not animate. However, human animacy judgments do not reflect this binary classification. They suggest that there are borderline cases, such as virus, amoeba, fly, and imaginary beings (giant, dragon, god). Moreover, human roles (professor, mother, girlfriend) are consistently recognized as animate by far less than 100% of human judges.

Method

In this paper, I use computational modeling to identify features associated with human animacy judgments, modeling human animacy and living/non-living judgments using both bottom-up predictors (the principal components from a word embedding model) and top-down predictors (cosine

SUBMITTER:  

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10278539 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature