Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Animacy is widely thought to be conceptualized as a gradient, with humans on one end and artifacts (e.g. towel, fork) on the other. Cognitive scientists lack a clear understanding of the linguistic/conceptual organization of entities in the middle of the continuum (e.g., trees, fire, a river). Progress in this domain is constrained by over-reliance on aliveness judgments (e.g., "is a river alive?") as a way of operationalizing animacy. We present a novel method for studying animacy, an adaptation of the Implicit Association Task (IAT). While plants are judged to be alive more often than natural abiotic entities such as fire, our IAT suggests that U.S. English speakers conceptualize plants and natural abiotic entities as having similar levels of animacy. These findings highlight the need for a more comprehensive theory of how concepts of animacy are reflected in different ways across linguistic contexts.