Cristina Burani

Word naming times and psycholinguistic norms for Italian nouns

The present study describes normative measures for 626 Italian simple nouns. The database (LEXVAR. XLS) is freely available for down-loading on the Web site http://wwwistc.ip.rm.cnr.it/material/ database/. For each of the 626 nouns, values for the following variables are reported: age of acquisition, familiarity, imageability, concreteness, adult written frequency, child written frequency, adult spoken frequency, number of orthographic neighbors, mean bigram frequency, length in syllables, and length in letters. A classification of lexical stress and of the type of word-initial phoneme is also provided. The intercorrelations among the variables, a factor analysis, and the effects of variables and of the extracted factors on word naming are reported. Naming latencies were affected primarily by a factor including word length and neighborhood size and by a word frequency factor. Neither a semantic factor including imageability, concreteness, and age of acquisition nor a factor defined by mean bigram frequency had significant effects on pronunciation times. These results hold for a language with shallow orthography, like Italian, for which lexical nonsemantic properties have been shown to affect reading aloud. These norms are useful in a variety of research areas involving the manipulation and control of stimulus attributes.

Word reading and picture naming in Italian.

Results from two separate norming studies of lexical access in Italian were merged, permitting a comparison of word-reading and picture-naming latencies and the factors that predict each one for an overlapping subsample of 128 common nouns. Factor analysis of shared lexical predictors yielded four latent variables: a frequency factor, a semantic factor, a length factor, and a final factor dominated by frication on the initial phoneme. Age of acquisition (AoA) loaded highly on the first two factors, suggesting that it can be split into separate sources of variance. Regression analyses using factor scores as predictors showed that word reading and picture naming are both influenced by the frequency/AoA factor. The semantics/AoA factor influenced only picture naming, whereas the length and frication factors influenced only word reading. Generalizability of these results to other languages is discussed, including potential effects of cross-language differences in orthographic transparency.

How Early Does Morpholexical Reading Develop in Readers of a Shallow Orthography

In this research, lexical and morpholexical reading in Italian children ages 8 to 10 years were investigated. Children and control adults were administered two tasks on words and pseudowords: visual lexical decision and naming. Word frequency effects in both lexical decision and naming were found in both children and adults. For all age groups pseudowords made up of roots and derivational suffixes were decided more frequently as possible words and were named more quickly and accurately than matched pseudowords with no morphological constituency. These results show that morpholexical reading is available and efficient in young readers of a shallow orthography, with similar patterns in children and adults.

Italian developmental dyslexic and proficient readers: Where are the differences?

Italian dyslexic children are characterized by a pervasive reading speed deficit, with relatively preserved accuracy. This pattern has been associated with predominant use of the nonlexical reading procedure. However, there is no evidence of a deficit in the lexical route of Italian dyslexics. We investigated both lexical and nonlexical reading procedures in dyslexic children through two marker effects, namely, the word frequency effect and the effect of contextual grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules. Although dyslexics were slower and less accurate than controls, they were affected by word frequency, grapheme contextuality, and their interaction in a similar manner as average readers. These results show the use of lexical reading in Italian dyslexics, and refute the claim of a deficit in whole-word processing with consequent over-reliance on the nonlexical route.

Morpheme-based reading aloud: Evidence from dyslexic and skilled Italian readers

The role of morphology in reading aloud was examined measuring naming latencies to pseudowords and words composed of morphemes (roots and derivational suffixes) and corresponding simple pseudowords and words. Three groups of Italian children of different ages and reading abilities, including dyslexic children, as well as one group of adult readers participated in the study. All four groups read faster and more accurately pseudowords composed of root and suffix than simple pseudowords (Experiment 1). Unlike skilled young and adult readers, both dyslexics and younger children benefited from morphological structure also in reading aloud words (Experiment 2). It is proposed that the morpheme is a unit of intermediate grain size that proves useful in processing all linguistic stimuli, including words, in individuals with limited reading ability (dyslexics and younger readers) who did not fully develop mastering of whole-word processing. For skilled readers, morphemic parsing is useful for reading those stimuli (i.e., pseudowords made up of morphemes), for which a whole-word lexical unit does not exist; where such whole-word lexical units do exist, skilled readers do not need to rely on morphological parsing because they can rely on a lexical (whole-word) reading unit that is larger than the morpheme.

The Influence of Age of Acquisition, Root Frequency, and Context Availability in Processing Nouns and Verbs ☆

In the Italian language there is a higher number of inflectional suffixes in verbs than in nouns, and this might imply that verbs are more likely to undergo a morphological analysis in terms of root and suffix as compared to nouns (Traficante & Burani, unpublished observations). Moreover, verbs tend to be more abstract than nouns, and this aspect might make verb processing more difficult. Finally, the developmental gap in the production of nouns and verbs suggests that age of acquisition might affect noun and verbs differently. Nouns and verbs were presented in a lexical decision and in a naming task. The morphological variable root frequency in addition to word frequency, length and word age of acquisition, and the semantic variables concreteness and context availability (Schwanenflugel, Harnishfeger, & Stowe, 1988) were used as predictors in multiple-regression analyses in which lexical decision and naming latencies were the dependent variables. The results showed that age of acquisition, context availability, and root frequency are all important in predicting both lexical decision and naming latencies for nouns and verbs, but age of acquisition and root frequency are better predictors of the differences in processing Italian nouns and verbs.

LEXICAL EFFECTS IN LEFT NEGLECT DYSLEXIA. A STUDY IN ITALIAN PATIENTS

This study investigated whether and to what extent the reading performance of six Italian right-brain-damaged patients with left neglect dyslexia was affected by lexical variables. The lexicality of responses (either words or nonwords) and the distribution of substitution vs. omission neglect errors were measured. Patients were given the following tasks: (1) reading aloud monomorphemic words of different frequencies and nonwords with different degrees of similarity to real words (Experiment 1); (2) reading aloud morphologically complex (suffixed) derived words and morphologically complex (suffixed) nonwords (Experiment 2). Patients could be distinguished in terms of their sensitivity to the lexical status of the target. Four patients exhibited lexicality effects in their reading performance, while two patients did not. The dissociation is discussed in terms of the interaction between defective visuospatial analysis, which characterises neglect, and higher-order lexical knowledge. The suggestion is made that lexical effects in neglect dyslexia reflect a relative preservation of visuospatial processing of the left side of the letter string, its absence a more severe neglect disorder. This interpretation of the occurrence of lexical effects in left neglect dyslexia in terms of severity of the spatial disorder is specific to the domain of reading, however, and does not extend to other manifestations of unilateral spatial neglect. Finally, the relationship between error type (omissions vs. substitutions) and the absence vs. presence of lexical effects is considered.

Neglect dyslexia: a review of the neuropsychological literature

Neglect dyslexia (ND) is reviewed, based on published single-patient and group studies. ND is frequently associated with right hemispheric damage and unilateral spatial neglect (USN), and typically involves the left side of the letter string. Left-brain-damaged patients showing ND, ipsilateral (left) or contralateral (right) to the side of the left-sided hemispheric lesion, have also been reported, as well as a few patients with bilateral damage, with more frequently left than right ND. As USN, ND is temporarily ameliorated by lateralized stimulations (vestibular caloric, visual prism adaptation). ND may occur independent of USN, suggesting the damage to specific visuospatial representational/attentional systems, supporting reading. ND errors comprise omission, substitution, and, less frequently, addition of letters on one side of the stimulus, resulting in words or nonwords, also with reference to the stimulus’ linguistic features. Patients with ND may show preserved lexical–morphological effects and implicit processing, up to the semantic level, of the misread string. This preserved processing is a feature of ND, shared with the USN syndrome. The mechanisms modulating error type and lexical–morphological effects are partly independent of each other. Different levels of representation of the letter string may be affected, giving rise to egocentric, stimulus-centred, and word-centred patterns of impairment. The anatomical correlates of ND include the temporo-parieto-occipital regions.

Morpholexical access and naming: the semantic interpretability of new root-suffix combinations.

In two experiments, pseudowords made up of Italian roots and derivational suffixes were investigated. In visual lexical decision, the licensing of a new root-suffix combination was affected by its semantic interpretability, but not by its grammatical appropriateness. By contrast, the degree of interpretability of new root-suffix combinations did not affect naming. However, and irrespective of differences in interpretability, pseudowords made up of two morphemes were named more efficiently than pseudowords with no morphological constituency. These results, while showing the involvement of the semantic component in the licensing process, also show its dissociability in lexical naming, thus suggesting morpholexical nonsemantic naming.

Traces of vocabulary acquisition in the brain: Evidence from covert object naming.

One of the strongest predictors of the speed with which adults can name a pictured object is the age at which the object and its name are first learned. Age of acquisition also predicts the retention or loss of individual words following brain damage in conditions like aphasia and Alzheimers disease. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) was used to reveal brain areas differentially involved in naming objects with early or late acquired names. A baseline task involved passive viewing of non-objects. The comparison between the silent object naming conditions (early and late) with baseline showed significant activation in frontal, parietal and mediotemporal regions bilaterally and in the lingual and fusiform gyri on the left. Direct comparison of early and late items identified clusters with significantly greater activation for early acquired items at the occipital poles (in the posterior parts of the middle occipital gyri) and at the left temporal pole. In contrast, the left middle occipital and fusiform gyri showed significantly greater activation for late than early acquired items. We propose that greater activation to early than late objects at the occipital poles and at the left temporal pole reflects the more detailed visual and semantic representations of early than late acquired items. We propose that greater activation to late than early objects in the left middle occipital and fusiform gyri occurs because those areas are involved in mapping visual onto semantic representations, which is more difficult, and demands more resource, for late than for early items.