Is a brick (mattone) a big mad (matto)? What can alterate forms in Italian tell us about morphological parsing in children with dyslexia and skilled readers

We studied the role of semantic and morpho-orthographic information in word naming, by using Italian alterate forms. Thirty-two children with dyslexia and 64 same-age skilled readers (mean age: 134 months) were requested to read alterate nouns (e.g. librone, big book), fully parsable pseudo-alterate nouns (e.g. mattone, brick) and simple nouns ending with a pseudo-suffix (e.g. carbone, coal). Alterate nouns are read faster than simple words, while no difference emerged between the two types of simple words. Data are in favour of a dual-route access to morphologically complex words based on both whole word and morphemic constituents, linked to semantic representations.