title: Word naming times and psycholinguistic norms for Italian nouns.
abstract: 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/materia/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.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council (CNR), University of Rome La Sapienza, Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Barca
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Burani
authors.forename: Lisa S
authors.initials: LS
authors.lastname: Arduino
mesh_terms: D019992:Databases as Topic; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D014825:Vocabulary