Abstract

The aim of the present work is exploring the syllable frequency effect in Italian. We ran two Experiments to investigate the involvement of syllables in lexical decision and reading aloud. The results exhibit the syllable frequency effect in the reading aloud (Experiment 2), but not in the lexical decision task (Experiment 1). The results, in line with previous findings, show that participants use syllables as processing units during speech production. Moreover, our results are relevant for the theoretical debate about the syllable involvement in visual word recognition: in Italian, people would not use syllables to identify a stimulus as word or non-word.