The Role of Richness of Encoding in Animacy Effect of the Recognition of Chinese Vocabulary

  • XING Min ,
  • LIU Xiping
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  • 1. Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education, Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Social Science Laboratory of Students' Mental Development and Learning, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387;
    2. School of Educational Science, Xinyang Normal University, Xinyang 464000

Received date: 2022-07-09

  Online published: 2023-05-18

Abstract

Animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of animate entities over inanimate entities; however, its underlying mechanism is not yet known. The richness of encoding account suggests that animate items stimulate more ideas than inanimate items, which provides more cues for memory retrieval. The current study focused on whether richness of encoding may provide a more robust explanation for animacy effect or not. The animacy effect in the recognition of Chinese vocabulary was investigated under the conditions of rich encoding (Experiment 1) and limited encoding (Experiment 2 and Experiment 3). The results showed that animacy effects were robust in the recognition of Chinese vocabulary under both rich and limited encoding conditions; the recognition of animate items was significantly better than that of inanimate items. No degradation of the animation effect was found in the dual-task paradigm. Recognition of inanimate words, rather than animate words, was more influenced by the memory load task: the more difficult the memory load task, the more impaired the recognition of inanimate words. The results indicate that there is a robust animacy effect in the recognition of Chinese vocabulary; the richness of encoding is an automatic processing mechanism triggered by the animate attributes of items.

Cite this article

XING Min , LIU Xiping . The Role of Richness of Encoding in Animacy Effect of the Recognition of Chinese Vocabulary[J]. Studies of Psychology and Behavior, 2023 , 21(2) : 177 -184 . DOI: 10.12139/j.1672-0628.2023.02.005

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