Language production studies tend to investigate central tendencies, though there are extensive individual differences in any production task. Studying this variability in behavior can be revealing of the motivations and consequences of production choices. In a picture-description task, participants used either active object or passive relative clauses to describe animate or inanimate entities i...

This paper examines the effects of animacy on relative clauses production in Greek. Previous studies in English suggest that animacy influences structure preferences in main and relative clauses: animate entities are typically made the subject of the verb and this tendency often results in passive structures. In the present experiment, Greek speakers were presented with pictures depicting actio...

A well-known typological observation is the dominance of subject-initial word orders, SOV and SVO, across the world's languages. Recent findings from gestural language creation paradigms offer possible explanations for the prevalence of SOV. When asked to gesture transitive events with an animate agent and inanimate patient, gesturers tend to produce SOV order, regardless of their native langua...

Several studies suggest that referential choices are influenced by animacy. On the one hand, animate referents are more likely to be mentioned as subjects than inanimate referents. On the other hand, animate referents are more frequently pronominalized than inanimate referents. These effects have been analyzed as effects of conceptual accessibility. In this paper, we raise the question whether ...

Recent evidence suggests that animate stimuli are remembered better than matched inanimate stimuli. Two experiments tested whether this animacy effect persists in paired-associate learning of foreign words. Experiment 1 randomly paired Swahili words with matched animate and inanimate English words. Participants were told simply to learn the English "translations" for a later test. Replicating e...