Influence of verb and noun bases on reading aloud derived nouns: evidence from children with good and poor reading skills

Abstract

Several studies on children and adults with and without linguistic impairment have reported differences between verb and noun processing. The present study assessed whether noun and verb bases affect differently children's reading of derived words. Thirty-six Italian good readers and 18 poor readers, all 4th or 5th graders, were asked to read aloud nouns derived from either a noun base (e.g., artista, artist) or a verb base (e.g., punizione, punishment). Word and base frequency affected latencies only for deverbal nouns, while an effect of word length emerged for denominal nouns and an inhibitory effect of suffix length was found for both types of stimuli. A high base frequency and a high whole-word frequency both led to higher levels of accuracy. Verb bases led to higher error rates than noun bases. Poor readers, although slower and less accurate than good readers, showed a pattern of results similar to that of typically developing readers. Data confirm that in 4th and 5th graders morphological decomposition may affect reading aloud of long complex words, and that the grammatical class of the base can modulate this effect.

Is Morphological Awareness a Relevant Predictor of Reading Fluency and Comprehension? New Evidence From Italian Monolingual and Arabic-Italian Bilingual Children

“…Importantly, all words employed in the experimental tasks were drawn from classical studies of morphological masked priming conducted in Italian (e.g., Marelli et al, 2013;Amenta et al, 2015) or reading experiments run on Italian fourth and fifth graders with and without reading difficulties (Traficante et al, 2014).…”

Affixation in semantic space: Modeling morpheme meanings with compositional distributional semantics.

“…If, when reading a derived word, participants' performance is influenced by stem frequency, the corresponding stem representation must contribute in some way to the processing of the derived word. Although many studies have exploited frequency effects to investigate derived-word processing (e.g., Taft, 2004;Baayen, Wurm, & Aycock, 2008;Traficante, Marelli, Luzzatti, & Burani, 2014), surprisingly this has not been done in conjunction with semantic transparency measures. This tradition is instead well-established in the compound domain, where many studies investigated how ST modulates constituent frequency effects (Pollatsek & Hyönä, 2005;Frisson, Niswander-Klement, & Pollatsek, 2008;Marelli & Luzzatti, 2012).…”

Word selection processing in Parkinson's disease: When nouns are more difficult than verbs

“…For instance, in a language with rich morphology such as Italian, there are about 50 inflected verb forms (with different suffixes to differentiate forms by tense, mood, person, and number), 2-4 noun forms, and 2-4 adjective forms (with different suffixes for gender and number). For this reason, distributional properties of noun, adjective, and verb forms have been considered as one of the main features that may generate differences between grammatical classes in word recognition tasks (e.g., Deutsch, Frost, & Forster, 1998, for Hebrew;Kostić & Katz, 1987, for Serbo-Croatian;Traficante, 2012, Traficante & Burani, 2003, and Traficante, Marelli, Luzzatti, & Burani, 2014. Siri et al (2008) provided evidence that activation of the left IFG is modulated by selection demands during morphological processes rather than by verb-specific processing.…”