Visual processing of Italian verbs and adjectives: The role of the inflectional family size

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

“…In addition, and consistently with the presence of morphemic effects, the surprising absence of the word length effect for deverbal stimuli proves that, even in a language with transparent orthography such as Italian, and also during literacy acquisition, readers make use of reading units (morphemes) at a grain-size that is wider than single letters. Overall, these results extend the hypothesis made for the recognition of inflected forms (see Colombo & Burani, 2002;Laudanna et al, 2002;Traficante & Burani, 2003) to derived forms, i.e., an extensive use of parsing strategies and activation of morphemic units when processing verb forms.…”

“…The present paper focuses on the effect of this variable, as many studies in several languages (e.g., English, Hebrew, Serbo-Croatian, Italian) have revealed differences in processing nouns and verbs not only in healthy adults, but also in patients with acquired language impairments and in children with typical and atypical language development (e.g., Egan & Pring, 2004;Luzzatti et al, 2002;Marshall, 2003). Distributional properties of noun and verb forms have been considered as one of the main features that may generate such differences (Deutsch et al, 1998;Kostić & Katz, 1987;Traficante & Burani, 2003). The objective of this study was to assess whether the breadth of the inflectional paradigm (inflectional family size) might contribute to the use of the base morpheme as a processing unit when children with different reading skills read a derived suffixed word aloud.…”

“…In Italian, individuals tend to recognize and read verbs aloud more slowly than nouns and adjectives, and RTs for verbs, but not for nouns or adjectives, are correlated with their base frequency (Colombo & Burani, 2002;Traficante, Barca, & Burani, 2004;Traficante & Burani, 2003). To account for this pattern of data, Traficante and Burani (2003) proposed a role for the inflectional family size of a word: the higher the number of inflected forms linked to a given base, the slower the processing of each individual inflected form. If the inflectional family is large, it is highly possible that the verbs are read and recognized through their morphemic constituents, and competition among inflected word forms may arise.…”

Morphological influences on the recognition of monosyllabic monomorphemic words

“…Inflectional entropy was observed to be a significant independent predictor in visual lexical decision in (Tabak et al, 2005) (see also Traficante & Burani, 2003, for the importance of inflectional families). Recall that our frequency measure is string-based, and does not collapse the frequencies of a word's inflectional variants into a 'lemma'-based frequency measure.…”

The simultaneous effects of inflectional paradigms and classes on lexical recognition: Evidence from Serbian

“…Kostić, 1991Kostić, , 1995Lukatela, Gligorijević, Kostić, & Turvey, 1980). The Italian studies (Colombo & Burani, 2002;Traficante & Burani, 2003) suggest that the number of inflected variants in which a word can appear (i.e., its inflectional family size) is positively correlated with the lexical decision latencies to that word. For instance, Italian adjectives have fewer inflected variants than verbs, and the study by Taficante and Burani reports that adjectives are recognized faster than verbs.…”