Frequency, not age of acquisition affects Italian word naming.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the claim that age of acquisition (AoA) and word frequency effects are reduced or nonexistent in languages which have very regular letter-to-sound mappings, like Italian. The first two experiments (Exp. 1, Exp. 2) showed that frequency variables affect reading aloud and lexical decision in Italian. Variables interpretable as pertaining to a semantic component, including AoA, affected lexical decision but not reading aloud. In Exp. 3 and 4, a measure of frequency - child written word frequency, ChFreq - and AoA were manipulated. Reading performance was affected by word frequency but not by AoA (Exp. 3) whereas lexical decision was affected by both variables (Exp. 4). In Exp. 5 and Exp. 6, ChFreq and AoA were manipulated orthogonally. Only frequency affected reading aloud, with no main effect or interaction involving AoA (Exp. 5). The effects of AoA and frequency interacted in Exp. 6 for lexical decision due to a larger effect of AoA for low- than high-frequency words. These results show that in languages with a transparent orthography word frequency may affect reading aloud in the absence of an effect of AoA because Italian readers employ le