ABSTRACT
Italian is a language with a transparent orthography characterized by an almost one-to-one grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence. Readers of transparent orthographies can, in principle, process all written words successfully by using grapheme-phoneme correspondences (letter-sound rules) without accessing the lexicon. Recent research suggests that Italian readers consistently read words which they have previously encountered better than non-words, which, by definition, they have never previously encountered (Pagliuca, Arduino, Barca, & Burani, 2008; Paulesu et al., 2000). This suggests that Italian readers do not rely solely on decoding words using grapheme-phoneme correspondences but on stored lexical knowledge of familiar words. These effects are also apparent in comparisons of high-and low-frequency words (Barca, Burani, & Arduino, 2002; Bates, Burani, D’Amico, & Barca, 2001; Burani, Barca, & Ellis, 2006; Colombo, Pasini, & Balota, 2006) and in research examining the morphemic constituents of words, such as roots and affixes (Burani & Laudanna, 2003). Consequently, there is a growing body of evidence indicating that reading in transparent scripts, and specifically in Italian, which is the focus here, is lexical.
