The Assembly of Phonology in Italian and English: Consonants and Vowels

This chapter is focussed on the nature of the assembly mechanism in reading. Several topics are discussed, but the main issue is related to whether independent representations and processes are involved in the construction of the phonology for consonants and vowels. The model proposed by Berent and Perfetti (1995), the two-cycles model, supporting the notion of a processing priority for consonants, is presented and discussed in the light of recent experimental data in Italian, showing a pattern that provides only partial support for the two-cycles model. In particular, the processing advantage for consonants as compared to vowels appearing in the backward masking paradigm in Berent and Perfetti’s data can be attributed to the irregularity of vowels in the English language. Another factor that may affect the process of converting print into sound, and is important in Italian, is the ratio between consonants and vowels. Because there are fewer vowels than consonants in Italian, they belong to a smaller domain, and the phonological emergence of vowels is faster as compared to that of consonants, leading to their advantage in Italian. The implications of the different findings in Italian and English are discussed.

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