Italian norms and naming latencies for 357 high quality color images

In the domain of cognitive studies on the lexico-semantic representational system, one of the most important means of ensuring well-suited 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 for this aim as they reduce the difficulty of visual decoding processes that may emerge with traditional image sets of line drawings, especially in clinical populations. We provide Italian norms for a set of 357 high quality image-items belonging to 23 semantic subcategories. Data from several variables affecting image processing: age of acquisition, familiarity, lexical frequency, manipulability, name agreement, typicality and visual complexity; were collected from a sample of 255 Italian-speaking participants. Lexical frequency data were derived from the CoLFIS corpus. Furthermore, we collected data with on image naming latencies aimed at exploring how much of the variance in these latencies could be explained by the above mentioned 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 is also a significant predictor. The described Italian normative data and naming latencies are available for download as supplementary material.