Amore, V. & Laudanna, A.
Department of Communication Sciences. University of Salerno. Salerno, Italy.
The verbal morphology of Italian includes both idiosyncratic irregular phenomena and sub-regular patterns, shared by families of morpho-phonologically similar verbs. We carried out one experiment of production of inflected verbal forms in sentence contexts, by employing regular and sub-regular verbs of Italian 2nd and 3rd conjugations. The experiment was aimed at verifying whether the production of regular and sub-regular verb forms is influenced by phonological similarity to other existing verbs. For each regular verb, a morpho-phonologically similar sub-regular verb was selected (e.g., the regular verb DEFINIRE (to define), was matched with the sub-regular PROVENIRE (to come from)). A control list of regular verbal forms not similar to other sub-regular verbs (e.g. COMPIERE (to carry out)) was created. The results showed slower reaction times on sub-regular verbs than on regular ones, which, in turn, were slower than control verbs. We hypothesize that the predictability of inflectional patterns depends both on their regularity and on the internal consistency of verbs belonging to the same morpho-phonological family.