Reading units in Italian children: evidence from morphological, orthographic and semantic features on word reading process.

This thesis investigates the morphological, orthographic and semantic features affecting the word reading process in Italian primary-school children and at the same time the different reading units which young readers are able to rely on. In Chapter 1, an overview on reading models and on studies showing a complex scenario of results has been proposed. In Chapter 2, a pseudoword reading task has been carried out in order to provide evidence of a lexical reading in Italian children that can be based on whole-word representations. In Chapter 3, we aimed at presenting a morphological-oriented coding scheme of reading errors performed by Italian children in a morphologically complex words reading. This analysis showed reliability on morphemic structure when children read morphologically complex words, and their ability to use morphemes as intermediate grain size reading units. Chapters 4 and 5 presented a new measure, the Orthography-Semantics Consistency (OSC), quantifying the consistency of the orthographic and semantic information carried in a word, and moving from the hypothesis that orthographic-semantic associations, even if they are not morpheme-mediated, play a crucial role in word reading process over and above morpheme units. In order to validate OSC measure from a developmental point of view, a morphological masked priming task and a simple lexical decision task have been first performed by a group of English children, as OSC measure was validated on English language data only (Chapter 4), and then by a group of Italian children (Chapter 5).