City Research Online

Abstract

Animacy plays an important role in cognition (e.g., memory and language). Across languages, a processing advantage for animate words (representing living beings), comparatively to inanimate words (i.e., non-living things), has been found mostly in young adults. Evidence in older adults, though, is still unclear, possibly due to the use of stimuli not properly characterised for this age group. Indeed, whereas several animacy word-rating studies already exist for young adults, these are non-existent for older adults. This work provides animacy ratings for 500 British English and 224 European Portuguese words, rated by young and older adults from the corresponding countries. The comparisons across languages and ages revealed a high interrater agreement. Nonetheless, the Portuguese samples provided higher mean ratings of animacy than the British samples. Also, the older adults assigned, on average, higher animacy ratings than the young adults. The Age X Language interaction was non-significant. These results suggest an inter-age and inter-language consistency in whether a word represents an animate or an inanimate thing, although with some differences, emphasising the need for age- and language-specific word rating data. The animacy ratings are available via OSF: https://osf.io/6xjyv/.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Copyright: © 2023 Félix et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Publisher Keywords:	Young Adult; Humans; Aged; Mental Recall; Portugal; Language; Cognition
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Psychology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

Export

Downloads