Being alive: how biology, agency and naturalness predict English speakers' understanding of life.

Animacy is an essential construct in cognitive science, distinguishing animate entities like a gorilla from inanimate entities like a shovel. Animacy is often investigated by observing how people interpret the meaning of the word alive. While aliveness is conventionally understood to be a dichotomy-something is either alive or not-many English-speakers' judgments about alive conflict with this dichotomy. Specifically, animals are more often judged alive than plants and natural abiotic entities (e.g., ocean, geyser) more often judged alive than artifacts (e.g., airplane, towel). This study asks: 1) whether such non-conventional judgments emerge across a range of tasks and 2) how alive integrates knowledge of category boundaries and conceptual gradients. Across seven experiments, non-conventional aliveness judgments were observed regardless of whether the stimuli were words or images, or whether participants were under time pressure or not. Analyses with conditional inference trees indicate that English speakers interpret humans/animals as alive categorically, and that variance in aliveness judgments is predicted by a range of conceptual gradients, such as capacity for growth and perception. Aliveness judgments also varied substantially across individual participants. These results suggest that alive, as a linguistic object, constitutes a unique packaging of knowledge related to animacy, opening new lines of inquiry about how animacy is reflected in similar or different ways across linguistic vs. non-linguistic tasks.