Abstract

An experiment aimed at testing the hypothesis that position of irregularity within a word affects reading time was performed in Italian, a language with a regular mapping from orthography to phonology. Using low-frequency loan words as an equivalent of irregular words in other languages we found a strong effect of regularity. The increase of latencies in reading aloud was restricted to those loan words violating Italian grapheme-phoneme mappings (namely, exception loan words). Regular loan words and native words showed similar latencies. To test the effect of position, the exception loan words were categorized into 5 conditions on the basis of the position (1st through 5th) of their irregular grapheme to phoneme correspondence. Results showed that the cost of irregularity decreased over the 5 positions of irregularity. This data will be discussed in the framework of dual route theory.