Lucia Colombo | Università degli Studi di Padova (original) (raw)

Papers by Lucia Colombo

Brain Research, 2012

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the a... more This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2019

The Mental Lexicon, 2006

We investigated the performance of two connectionist neural networks with different architectures... more We investigated the performance of two connectionist neural networks with different architectures to explore the degree of learning in generating the past participle form of Italian verbs on the basis of phonological characteristics. The networks were trained to generate the past participle form of verbs from different inflected input forms. We examined the degree of learning relative to the type of inflection given as input, the type of suffix produced, the classification of each verb according to the thematic vowel, the regularity of the stem and of the suffix. The networks were able to learn both regular and irregular forms, but the effect of regularity depended on the distributional properties of the conjugation to which a verb belongs, and on information provided by the input.

Reading and Writing, 2014

ABSTRACT Italian has regular spelling-sound correspondences; however, assignment of lexical stres... more ABSTRACT Italian has regular spelling-sound correspondences; however, assignment of lexical stress is unpredictable. Sensitivity to stress neighborhood information was investigated by constructing three types of three-syllabic nonwords: nonwords with word-endings characterized by a strong neighborhood of dominant stress words (dominant), nonwords with word-endings characterized by a strong neighborhood of non-dominant stress words (non-dominant), and nonwords with word-endings characterized by weak and/or inconsistent stress neighborhoods (ambivalent). Examples of these three types of nonwords were used as targets in a priming experiment. Examples of two of these types of nonwords (dominant and non-dominant) were used as primes. Adults (Experiment 1) and second and fourth-grade children (Experiment 2) were tested in a reading aloud task, and percentage of responses with dominant stress was measured. Children were sensitive to item-specific stress neighborhood information, but less so than adults. Children demonstrated more marked effects of dominant stress, effects that appear to decrease with age. Children also showed smaller effects of prosodic priming compared to adults. The results are in line with a statistical approach to learning.

Brain Research, 2010

This study aimed at investigating the effects of acoustic distance and of speaker variability on ... more This study aimed at investigating the effects of acoustic distance and of speaker variability on the pre-attentive and attentive perception of French vowels by French adult speakers. The electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded while participants watched a silent movie (Passive condition) and discriminated deviant vowels (Active condition). The auditory sequence included 4 French vowels, /u/ (standard) and /o/, /y/ and /ø/ as deviants, produced by 3 different speakers. As the vowel /o/ is closer to /u/ than the other deviants in acoustic distance, we predicted smaller mismatch negativity (MMN) and smaller N1 component, as well as higher error rate and longer reaction times. Results were in line with these predictions. Moreover, the MMN was elicited by all deviant vowels independently of speaker variability. By contrast, the Vowel by Speaker interaction was significant in the Active listening condition thereby showing that subtle within-category differences are processed at the attentive level. These results suggest that while vowels are categorized preattentively according to phonemic representations and independently of speaker variability, participants are sensitive to between-speaker differences when they focus attention on vowel processing.

Brain and Language, 2002

In the Italian language there is a higher number of inflectional suffixes in verbs than in nouns,... more In the Italian language there is a higher number of inflectional suffixes in verbs than in nouns, and this might imply that verbs are more likely to undergo a morphological analysis in terms of root and suffix as compared to nouns (Traficante & Burani, unpublished observations). Moreover, verbs tend to be more abstract than nouns, and this aspect might make verb processing more difficult. Finally, the developmental gap in the production of nouns and verbs suggests that age of acquisition might affect noun and verbs differently. Nouns and verbs were presented in a lexical decision and in a naming task. The morphological variable root frequency in addition to word frequency, length and word age of acquisition, and the semantic variables concreteness and context availability (Schwanenflugel, Harnishfeger, & Stowe, 1988) were used as predictors in multiple-regression analyses in which lexical decision and naming latencies were the dependent variables. The results showed that age of acquisition, context availability, and root frequency are all important in predicting both lexical decision and naming latencies for nouns and verbs, but age of acquisition and root frequency are better predictors of the differences in processing Italian nouns and verbs.

This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitte... more This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact rights@benjamins.nl or consult our website: www.benjamins.com

There has been substantial progress in understanding the production of individual speech sounds. ... more There has been substantial progress in understanding the production of individual speech sounds. Much less is known about prosodic aspects of speech production. Lexical stress is the prosodic contrast between strong and weak syllables within single words (compare ‘INcense’ with ‘inCENSE’ in English). The ability to achieve stress contrastivity during speech production shows a protracted developmental trajectory in healthy children and can be atypical in some individuals within certain populations (e.g., autism spectrum disorders). Almost all previous research in this area has examined speakers of English. One important gap in our understanding is whether lexical stress production seen in typically developing children is similar across languages. Here we provide new data regarding lexical stress production in typically developing Italian children (3-5 years), and a comparison with published data from English speaking children.

Memory & Cognition

The goal of the present study was to investigate the time-course of suprasegmental information in... more The goal of the present study was to investigate the time-course of suprasegmental information in visual word recognition. To this aim we measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a simple lexical decision task in Italian. Two factors were manipulated: Stress dominance (the most frequent stress type) and stress neighborhood consistency (the proportion and number of existent words sharing orthographic ending and stress pattern). Participants were presented with target words either bearing dominant (on the penultimate syllable; 'graNIta,' 'seNIle,' slush, senile) or non-dominant stress (on the antepenultimate syllable; 'MISsile,' 'BIbita,' missile, drink), and either having a consistent (graNIta, MISsile) or an inconsistent stress neighborhood (seNIle, BIbita). Our results showed in the initial stages of processing an effect that we interpreted as an early orthographic marker of stress neighborhood in interaction with dominance. Later, from 250 ms after target onset, a marker of the lexical stress difference also emerged. The role of stress assignment in word recognition is discussed.

Journal of Child Language, 2016

Noun and verb acquisition was investigated in three- and five-year-old Italian children by means ... more Noun and verb acquisition was investigated in three- and five-year-old Italian children by means of picture naming of objects and actions, selected from Druks and Masterson (2000). The aim was to examine the previously reported advantage of nouns compared to verbs. Older children were faster than younger children, and naming latencies were faster for object pictures than for action pictures. For errors, the advantage of objects over actions was greater for younger children. A qualitative analysis of errors was carried out according to a classification derived by Masterson, Druks, and Gallienne (2008). Overall, 25% of the errors reflected a complete lack of knowledge of the names or of the meanings of the pictures. Most errors, however, were likely to be due to a not yet fully developed knowledge of the meaning of words labelling the pictures, or to an incomplete conceptual representation, and this pattern was more marked for action concepts.

Psychol Res Psychol Forsch, Jul 31, 1995

The semantic priming technique was used to explore the semantic information activated by the cont... more The semantic priming technique was used to explore the semantic information activated by the contextually irrelevant meanings of ambiguous words in sentence contexts. The nature of the relationship between prime and target was systematically manipulated. Evidence of priming was obtained when the target was an approximate synonym of the prime (e.g., coach-bus), and when the target was a category coordinate

Reading as a Perceptual Process, 2000

Swiss Journal of Psychology, 2002

When people express a preference between two alternatives A and B in terms of a positive choice o... more When people express a preference between two alternatives A and B in terms of a positive choice of one option, this can exceed in strength the same preference expressed as a rejection of the alternative. This effect of response mode has been interpreted by Shafir (1993) in terms of response compatibility theory, according to which decision makers display an influence of the compatibility between the type of response (choose/reject) and the positive/negative attributes of the options. In the present study we investigated the influence on response mode (choice/rejection) of the attraction effect, in which a decoy similar to one of two options, but lower in value, modifies the share of the option to which it is similar when added to the original set ( Huber, Payne & Puto, 1982 ; Simonson & Tversky, 1992 ). A decoy negative in value, but similar to one of the alternatives was added to a two-option set, one with a high variation in attributes (enriched) and one with a low variation (impo...

Giornale italiano di psicologia, 2002

... LUCIA COLOMBO, GIUSEPPE SARTORI E CRISTINA BRIVIO ... Questa correlazione, analoga a quella t... more ... LUCIA COLOMBO, GIUSEPPE SARTORI E CRISTINA BRIVIO ... Questa correlazione, analoga a quella trovata per l'inglese con il test NART (National Adult Reading Test; Nelson, 1982) sfrutta l'irregolarità nell'accen-to delle parole italiane, irregolarità che permette di leggere ...

Memory & Cognition, 2015

Three lexical decision experiments were carried out in Italian, in order to verify if stress domi... more Three lexical decision experiments were carried out in Italian, in order to verify if stress dominance (the most frequent stress type) and consistency (the proportion and number of existent words sharing orthographic ending and stress pattern) had an effect on polysyllabic word recognition. Two factors were manipulated: whether the target word carried stress on the penultimate (dominant; "graNIta," "seNIle"-slush, senile) or on the antepenultimate (non-dominant) syllable ("MISsile," "BIbita"-missile, drink), and whether the stress neighborhood was consistent (graNIta, MISsile) or inconsistent (seNIle, BIbita) with the word's stress pattern. In Experiment 1, words were mixed with nonwords sharing the word endings, which made words and nonwords more similar to each other. In Experiment 2, words and nonwords were presented in lists blocked for stress pattern. In Experiment 3, we used a new set of nonwords, which included endings with (stress) ambiguous neighborhoods and/or with a low number of neighbors, and which were overall less similar to words. In all three experiments, there was an advantage for words with penultimate (dominant) stress and no main effect of stress neighborhood. However, the dominant stress advantage decreased in Experiments 2 and 3. Finally, in Experiment 4, the same materials used in Experiment 1 were also used in a reading-aloud task, showing a significant consistency effect but no dominant stress advantage. The influence of stress information in Italian word recognition is discussed.

Brain Research, 2012

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the a... more This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2019

The Mental Lexicon, 2006

We investigated the performance of two connectionist neural networks with different architectures... more We investigated the performance of two connectionist neural networks with different architectures to explore the degree of learning in generating the past participle form of Italian verbs on the basis of phonological characteristics. The networks were trained to generate the past participle form of verbs from different inflected input forms. We examined the degree of learning relative to the type of inflection given as input, the type of suffix produced, the classification of each verb according to the thematic vowel, the regularity of the stem and of the suffix. The networks were able to learn both regular and irregular forms, but the effect of regularity depended on the distributional properties of the conjugation to which a verb belongs, and on information provided by the input.

Reading and Writing, 2014

ABSTRACT Italian has regular spelling-sound correspondences; however, assignment of lexical stres... more ABSTRACT Italian has regular spelling-sound correspondences; however, assignment of lexical stress is unpredictable. Sensitivity to stress neighborhood information was investigated by constructing three types of three-syllabic nonwords: nonwords with word-endings characterized by a strong neighborhood of dominant stress words (dominant), nonwords with word-endings characterized by a strong neighborhood of non-dominant stress words (non-dominant), and nonwords with word-endings characterized by weak and/or inconsistent stress neighborhoods (ambivalent). Examples of these three types of nonwords were used as targets in a priming experiment. Examples of two of these types of nonwords (dominant and non-dominant) were used as primes. Adults (Experiment 1) and second and fourth-grade children (Experiment 2) were tested in a reading aloud task, and percentage of responses with dominant stress was measured. Children were sensitive to item-specific stress neighborhood information, but less so than adults. Children demonstrated more marked effects of dominant stress, effects that appear to decrease with age. Children also showed smaller effects of prosodic priming compared to adults. The results are in line with a statistical approach to learning.

Brain Research, 2010

This study aimed at investigating the effects of acoustic distance and of speaker variability on ... more This study aimed at investigating the effects of acoustic distance and of speaker variability on the pre-attentive and attentive perception of French vowels by French adult speakers. The electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded while participants watched a silent movie (Passive condition) and discriminated deviant vowels (Active condition). The auditory sequence included 4 French vowels, /u/ (standard) and /o/, /y/ and /ø/ as deviants, produced by 3 different speakers. As the vowel /o/ is closer to /u/ than the other deviants in acoustic distance, we predicted smaller mismatch negativity (MMN) and smaller N1 component, as well as higher error rate and longer reaction times. Results were in line with these predictions. Moreover, the MMN was elicited by all deviant vowels independently of speaker variability. By contrast, the Vowel by Speaker interaction was significant in the Active listening condition thereby showing that subtle within-category differences are processed at the attentive level. These results suggest that while vowels are categorized preattentively according to phonemic representations and independently of speaker variability, participants are sensitive to between-speaker differences when they focus attention on vowel processing.

Brain and Language, 2002

In the Italian language there is a higher number of inflectional suffixes in verbs than in nouns,... more In the Italian language there is a higher number of inflectional suffixes in verbs than in nouns, and this might imply that verbs are more likely to undergo a morphological analysis in terms of root and suffix as compared to nouns (Traficante & Burani, unpublished observations). Moreover, verbs tend to be more abstract than nouns, and this aspect might make verb processing more difficult. Finally, the developmental gap in the production of nouns and verbs suggests that age of acquisition might affect noun and verbs differently. Nouns and verbs were presented in a lexical decision and in a naming task. The morphological variable root frequency in addition to word frequency, length and word age of acquisition, and the semantic variables concreteness and context availability (Schwanenflugel, Harnishfeger, & Stowe, 1988) were used as predictors in multiple-regression analyses in which lexical decision and naming latencies were the dependent variables. The results showed that age of acquisition, context availability, and root frequency are all important in predicting both lexical decision and naming latencies for nouns and verbs, but age of acquisition and root frequency are better predictors of the differences in processing Italian nouns and verbs.

This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitte... more This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact rights@benjamins.nl or consult our website: www.benjamins.com

There has been substantial progress in understanding the production of individual speech sounds. ... more There has been substantial progress in understanding the production of individual speech sounds. Much less is known about prosodic aspects of speech production. Lexical stress is the prosodic contrast between strong and weak syllables within single words (compare ‘INcense’ with ‘inCENSE’ in English). The ability to achieve stress contrastivity during speech production shows a protracted developmental trajectory in healthy children and can be atypical in some individuals within certain populations (e.g., autism spectrum disorders). Almost all previous research in this area has examined speakers of English. One important gap in our understanding is whether lexical stress production seen in typically developing children is similar across languages. Here we provide new data regarding lexical stress production in typically developing Italian children (3-5 years), and a comparison with published data from English speaking children.

Memory & Cognition

The goal of the present study was to investigate the time-course of suprasegmental information in... more The goal of the present study was to investigate the time-course of suprasegmental information in visual word recognition. To this aim we measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a simple lexical decision task in Italian. Two factors were manipulated: Stress dominance (the most frequent stress type) and stress neighborhood consistency (the proportion and number of existent words sharing orthographic ending and stress pattern). Participants were presented with target words either bearing dominant (on the penultimate syllable; 'graNIta,' 'seNIle,' slush, senile) or non-dominant stress (on the antepenultimate syllable; 'MISsile,' 'BIbita,' missile, drink), and either having a consistent (graNIta, MISsile) or an inconsistent stress neighborhood (seNIle, BIbita). Our results showed in the initial stages of processing an effect that we interpreted as an early orthographic marker of stress neighborhood in interaction with dominance. Later, from 250 ms after target onset, a marker of the lexical stress difference also emerged. The role of stress assignment in word recognition is discussed.

Journal of Child Language, 2016

Noun and verb acquisition was investigated in three- and five-year-old Italian children by means ... more Noun and verb acquisition was investigated in three- and five-year-old Italian children by means of picture naming of objects and actions, selected from Druks and Masterson (2000). The aim was to examine the previously reported advantage of nouns compared to verbs. Older children were faster than younger children, and naming latencies were faster for object pictures than for action pictures. For errors, the advantage of objects over actions was greater for younger children. A qualitative analysis of errors was carried out according to a classification derived by Masterson, Druks, and Gallienne (2008). Overall, 25% of the errors reflected a complete lack of knowledge of the names or of the meanings of the pictures. Most errors, however, were likely to be due to a not yet fully developed knowledge of the meaning of words labelling the pictures, or to an incomplete conceptual representation, and this pattern was more marked for action concepts.

Psychol Res Psychol Forsch, Jul 31, 1995

The semantic priming technique was used to explore the semantic information activated by the cont... more The semantic priming technique was used to explore the semantic information activated by the contextually irrelevant meanings of ambiguous words in sentence contexts. The nature of the relationship between prime and target was systematically manipulated. Evidence of priming was obtained when the target was an approximate synonym of the prime (e.g., coach-bus), and when the target was a category coordinate

Reading as a Perceptual Process, 2000

Swiss Journal of Psychology, 2002

When people express a preference between two alternatives A and B in terms of a positive choice o... more When people express a preference between two alternatives A and B in terms of a positive choice of one option, this can exceed in strength the same preference expressed as a rejection of the alternative. This effect of response mode has been interpreted by Shafir (1993) in terms of response compatibility theory, according to which decision makers display an influence of the compatibility between the type of response (choose/reject) and the positive/negative attributes of the options. In the present study we investigated the influence on response mode (choice/rejection) of the attraction effect, in which a decoy similar to one of two options, but lower in value, modifies the share of the option to which it is similar when added to the original set ( Huber, Payne & Puto, 1982 ; Simonson & Tversky, 1992 ). A decoy negative in value, but similar to one of the alternatives was added to a two-option set, one with a high variation in attributes (enriched) and one with a low variation (impo...

Giornale italiano di psicologia, 2002

... LUCIA COLOMBO, GIUSEPPE SARTORI E CRISTINA BRIVIO ... Questa correlazione, analoga a quella t... more ... LUCIA COLOMBO, GIUSEPPE SARTORI E CRISTINA BRIVIO ... Questa correlazione, analoga a quella trovata per l'inglese con il test NART (National Adult Reading Test; Nelson, 1982) sfrutta l'irregolarità nell'accen-to delle parole italiane, irregolarità che permette di leggere ...

Memory & Cognition, 2015

Three lexical decision experiments were carried out in Italian, in order to verify if stress domi... more Three lexical decision experiments were carried out in Italian, in order to verify if stress dominance (the most frequent stress type) and consistency (the proportion and number of existent words sharing orthographic ending and stress pattern) had an effect on polysyllabic word recognition. Two factors were manipulated: whether the target word carried stress on the penultimate (dominant; "graNIta," "seNIle"-slush, senile) or on the antepenultimate (non-dominant) syllable ("MISsile," "BIbita"-missile, drink), and whether the stress neighborhood was consistent (graNIta, MISsile) or inconsistent (seNIle, BIbita) with the word's stress pattern. In Experiment 1, words were mixed with nonwords sharing the word endings, which made words and nonwords more similar to each other. In Experiment 2, words and nonwords were presented in lists blocked for stress pattern. In Experiment 3, we used a new set of nonwords, which included endings with (stress) ambiguous neighborhoods and/or with a low number of neighbors, and which were overall less similar to words. In all three experiments, there was an advantage for words with penultimate (dominant) stress and no main effect of stress neighborhood. However, the dominant stress advantage decreased in Experiments 2 and 3. Finally, in Experiment 4, the same materials used in Experiment 1 were also used in a reading-aloud task, showing a significant consistency effect but no dominant stress advantage. The influence of stress information in Italian word recognition is discussed.