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Reading in Spanish and Italian: Effects of age of acquisition in transparent orthographies?
- Source :
- Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology; Sep2014, Vol. 67 Issue 9, p1808-1825, 18p
- Publication Year :
- 2014
-
Abstract
- Despite the similar transparency of their orthographies, reading in Italian has been found to be affected by frequency but not age of acquisition (AoA) [Barca, L., Burani, C., & Arduino, L. S. (2002). Word naming times and psycholinguistic norms for Italian nouns.Behaviour Research Methods, Instruments and Computers,34, 424–434] while reading in Spanish is affected by AoA but not frequency [Cuetos, F., & Barbón, A. (2006). Word naming in Spanish.European Journal of Cognitive Psychology,18, 415–436]. We examined this cross-linguistic difference, firstly, through a reanalysis of the Italian and Spanish reading latencies. After eliminating several between-experiment differences, we replicated the AoA effect in Spanish but not in Italian and the frequency effect in Italian but not in Spanish. The cross-linguistic comparison could not equate stimulus imageability; therefore, secondly, we compared the Italian reading latencies with new Spanish reading latencies for imageability-matched words. We found frequency effects but neither an AoA effect nor a language by AoA interaction. We argue that the previously reported cross-linguistic difference in the AoA effect resulted from a between-study difference in stimulus imageability. More imageable words induced more semantic involvement in reading, yielding an AoA effect in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 17470218
- Volume :
- 67
- Issue :
- 9
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 98254492
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2013.872155