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 variabi

SUBMITTER: Ilic O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3869767 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature