In the domain of cognitive studies on the lexico-semantic representational system, one of
the most important means of ensuring effective experimental designs is using ecological
stimulus sets accompanied by normative data on the most relevant variables affecting the
processing of their items. In the context of image sets, color photographs are particularly
suited to this purpose as they reduce the difficulty of visual decoding processes that may
emerge with traditional image sets of line drawings. This is especially so in clinical populations.
In this study we provide Italian norms for a set of 357 high quality image-items belonging
to 23 semantic subcategories from the Moreno-Martı ́nez and Montoro database. Data
from several variables affecting image processing were collected from a sample of 255 Italian-
speaking participants: age of acquisition, familiarity, lexical frequency, manipulability,
name agreement, typicality and visual complexity. Lexical frequency data were derived from
the CoLFIS corpus. Furthermore, we collected data on image oral naming latencies to
explore how the variance in these latencies could be explained by these critical variables.
Multiple regression analyses on the naming latencies show classical psycholinguistic phenomena,
such as the effects of age of acquisition and name agreement. In addition, manipulability
was also a significant predictor. The described Italian normative data and naming
latencies are available for download as supplementary material.
