ANIMACY1
This article describes the role of animacy in the comprehension of language. Animacy
has an influence over the basic memory processes too. Recent researches have shown that people
remember animate items better than the inanimate items. Animacy is defined as a complex
cognitive process that affects a person’s learning processes, reasoning, perception and his
organisation of facts and knowledge. Animacy is extremely essential in memory and learning.
For instance, children learn about animate objects in an easier way. Researches have shown that
human newborns are sensitive to basic motion cues that are needed for animacy perception
(Nairne, VanArsdall and Cogdill, 2017). Animacy has been found to affect the brain-damaged
patients too. In a study, it was reported that the patients forgot the ability to remember the names
of the living things however; they remembered the names of the no-living entities.
Item characteristics are extremely important in memory. Episodic memory controls the
item characteristics like meaningfulness and concreteness that are needed for retention of items.
Rubin and Friendly in their investigation of item characteristics used regression techniques in
1986 in norm free call (Nairne, VanArsdall and Cogdill, 2017). They identified three main
components that helped in recalling of the object. These were formation of a visual image,
emotionality associated with the object and availability of the items as a sample of the words.
Other researches have implicated the presence of other variables like the length of the word, age
of acquisition and so on.
Researchers make animacy judgments that tell whether the items represent a living or a
non- living object. It is a difficult job to make comparisons between the animate and inanimate
objects as they differ alongside numerous dimensions (Nairne, VanArsdall and Cogdill, 2017).
Therefore, to get rid of this problem, researches went back to the analysis of recall norms done
by Rubin and Friendly in 1986. As animacy was never contemplated in their study, the

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