Table 1.
Dimensions on which animate and inanimate word lists were matched in Experiment 1
| Dimension (range of the rating scale) | Animate | Inanimate | Comparison | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| M | SD | M | SD | ||
| Semantic typicality (1–7) | 2.37 | 0.94 | 2.58 | 1.36 | t(140.12) = 1.11, p = .267, d = 0.18 |
| Age of acquisition (1–7) | 3.35 | 1.21 | 3.40 | 1.18 | t(158) = 0.25, p = .806, d = 0.04 |
| Conceptual familiarity (1–5) | 3.19 | 0.57 | 3.34 | 0.83 | t(140.65) = 1.34, p = .183, d = 0.21 |
| Word frequency | 9.54 | 17.65 | 9.00 | 18.27 | t(158) = 0.19, p = .850, d = 0.03 |
| Number of phonemes | 5.05 | 1.57 | 4.90 | 1.36 | t(158) = 0.65, p = .518, d = 0.10 |
| Number of syllables | 2.03 | 0.81 | 1.99 | 0.67 | t(152.21) = 0.32, p = .750, d = 0.05 |
| Number of letters | 6.15 | 1.66 | 5.74 | 1.52 | t(158) = 1.64, p = .104, d = 0.26 |
| Concreteness (1–7) | 5.17 | 0.51 | 5.08 | 0.54 | t(158) = 1.09, p = .276, d = 0.17 |
| Meaningfulness (1–7) | 3.66 | 0.72 | 3.60 | 0.75 | t(158) = 0.51, p = .614, d = 0.08 |
| Imagery (1–7) | 5.47 | 0.96 | 5.46 | 1.00 | t(158) = 0.11, p = .912, d = 0.02 |
Norms provided by Schröder et al. (2012) were taken to determine semantic typicality, age of acquisition, conceptual familiarity, word frequency (based on dlexDB database, Heister et al., 2011), number of phonemes, and number of syllables of the animate and inanimate words. Values for the number of letters, concreteness, meaningfulness, and imagery were taken from the norming study by Meinhardt et al. (2020). Words were selected so as to minimize, for each dimension, the mean differences between the lists of animate and inanimate words. The rightmost column shows that the lists of animate and inanimate words did not differ significantly on any of the controlled dimensions