Abstract:
In a direct replication of Radanović et al.’s (2016) work, the typical goal of this paper is to reproduce their experimental results by comparing the distribution of animacy in two languages coming from different language branches within the Indo-European language family, namely Persian and Serbian, with a new but comparable sample of participants. This study comprised of verb-agreement experimental task and a normative study which helped to describe the underlying distribution of semantic animacy in Persian. The findings of this study support the idea that semantic animacy is language independent due to its biological grounding and is more likely to be similar to linguistic animacy compared to pure biological animacy. Moreover, graded nature of semantic animacy was shown by the present results and is in line with Radanović et al.’s (2016) study.
