The influence of age of acquisition, root frequency and context availability in processing nouns and verbs.

In the Italian language there is a higher number of inflectional suffixes
in verbs than in nouns, and this might imply that verbs are more likely to
undergo a morphological analysis in terms of root and suffix as compared
to nouns (Traficante, & Burani, unpublished). Moreover, verbs tend to be
more abstract than nouns, and this aspect might make verb processing more
difficult. Finally, the developmental gap in the production of nouns and
verbs suggests that age of acquisition might affect noun and verbs
differently. Nouns and verbs were presented in a lexical decision and in
a naming task. The morphological variable root frequency in addition to
word frequency, length and word age-of-acquisition, and the semantic
variables concreteness and context availability (Schwanenflugel,
Harnishfeger, & Stowe, 1988) were used as predictors in multiple
regression analyses in which lexical decision and naming latencies were
the dependent variables. The results showed that age of acquisition,
context availability and root frequency are all important in predicting
both lexical decision and naming latencies for nouns and verbs, but age of
acquisition and root frequency are better predictors of the differences
in processing Italian nouns and verbs.