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dc.contributor.authorDolscheid, Sarah
dc.contributor.authorSchlenter, Judith
dc.contributor.authorPenke, Martina
dc.date.accessioned2024-04-19T10:34:05Z
dc.date.available2024-04-19T10:34:05Z
dc.date.issued2024-04-17
dc.description.abstractAnimacy plays a key role for human cognition, which is also reflected in the way humans process language. However, while experiments on sentence processing show reliable effects of animacy on word order and grammatical function assignment, effects of animacy on conjoined noun phrases (e.g., fish and shoe vs. shoe and fish) have yielded inconsistent results. In the present study, we tested the possibility that effects of animacy are outranked by reading and writing habits. We examined adult speakers of German (left-to-right script) and speakers of Arabic (right-to-left script), as well as German preschool children who do not yet know how to read and write. Participants were tested in a picture naming task that presented an animate and an inanimate entity next to one another. On half of the trials, the animate entity was located on the left and, on the other half, it was located on the right side of the screen. We found that adult German and Arabic speakers differed in their order of naming. Whereas German speakers were much more likely to mention the animate entity first when it was presented on the left than on the right, a reverse tendency was observed for speakers of Arabic. Thus, in literate adults, the ordering of conjoined noun phrases was influenced by reading and writing habits rather than by the animacy status of an entity. By contrast, pre-literate children preferred to start their utterances with the animate entity regardless of position, suggesting that effects of animacy in adults have been overwritten by effects of literacy.en_US
dc.identifier.citationDolscheid S, Schlenter J, Penke M. Literacy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German children and adult speakers of German and Arabic . PLOS ONE. 2024;19(4)en_US
dc.identifier.cristinIDFRIDAID 2262563
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298659
dc.identifier.issn1932-6203
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10037/33421
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.publisherPLOSen_US
dc.relation.journalPLOS ONE
dc.rights.accessRightsopenAccessen_US
dc.rights.holderCopyright 2024 The Author(s)en_US
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0en_US
dc.rightsAttribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)en_US
dc.titleLiteracy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German children and adult speakers of German and Arabicen_US
dc.type.versionpublishedVersionen_US
dc.typeJournal articleen_US
dc.typeTidsskriftartikkelen_US
dc.typePeer revieweden_US


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Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)