Abstract

Processes of word recognition and production are affected by many lexical and sublexical variables, in both adults and children, in both unimpaired and impaired language conditions. In the present paper, values are reported for 626 Italian nouns relative to the following variables: Word age of acquisition, familiarity, imageability, concreteness, frequency in adult and children written corpora, spoken frequency, number of orthographic neighbors, mean bigram frequency, length in syllables and in letters. A classification of the initial phoneme is also included. Correlations among variables are discussed. Current studies dealing with the effects of these variables in lexical processing are reviewed. With respect to some recent studies which investigated the role of some of these variables in picture naming for Italian (Nisi, Longoni and Snodgrass, 2000; Lotto, Dell'Acqua and Job, 2001), the present work deals specifically with properties of words, and extends the data base by including variables specifically relevant to word processing, with main reference to word naming. The present lexical data base, available in electronic format, has a specific utility for research on lexical processing, and provides a useful tool for the study, assessment and rehabilitation of Italian patients with disturbances of lexical processing.