Object and action naming in Italian-speaking children and adults

In the early stages of language development, verbs are usually acquired later than nouns. In this paper we explore differences between nouns and verbs at a later stage of development, comparing Italian-speaking children and adults in efficiency of lexical access for object vs. action names in an on-line (timed) picture-naming paradigm. Name agreement and reaction times were collected from 5-year-old children and young adults, for 250 black-and-white drawings of common objects and 275 drawings of actions. For object naming, target names (the names given by the majority of participants) were the same for children and adults on 92% of the items ; for action naming, children and adults agreed on only 48% of the items. Even for those items on which children and adults produced the same target name, children showed a significantly greater disadvantage for verbs, as expressed by reaction times. Factors contributing to these differences are explored in multivariate analyses.