Burani, C. 1 , Primativo, S. 1, 2 , Arduino, L. S. 1, 3 , O'Brien, S. 1 , Paizi, D. 1 & Rinaldi, P. 1
1 Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy
2 University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy
3 LUMSA University, Rome, Italy
Italian has a transparent orthography, with regular grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences. However, stress assignment to three-syllable words is not governed by rule but requires lexical-lookup. Mainly, in Italian there are two stress patterns and one is more frequent (dominant) than the other (non-dominant). Both word frequency and reader’s lexical knowledge are expected to affect correct stress assignment. Two groups of English-Italian bilingual adults, matched for age, gender and education but differing for age of arrival and years spent in Italy, were matched to one group of Italian readers. The groups of bilinguals differed for vocabulary size, as evaluated by semantic fluency and lexical decision. All groups read aloud three-syllabic words differing for frequency (high and low) and stress pattern (dominant and non-dominant). Both naming latencies and pronunciation accuracy were affected by vocabulary size, with main differences on low-frequency words. In assigning stress, vocabulary size interacted with word frequency and stress dominance. Both groups of bilingual readers made more errors of stress assignment on low-frequency words with non-dominant stress, than native Italian readers. Bilingual readers with a smaller vocabulary made more stress assignment errors than bilinguals with a larger vocabulary. The results confirm the role of lexical knowledge in reading Italian aloud.