Despite the similar transparency of their orthographies, reading in Italian is usually found to be affected by frequency but not age of acquisition (AoA) (Barca, Burani & Arduino, 2002) while reading in Spanish is affected by AoA but not frequency (Cuetos & Barb?n, 2006). We examined this cross-linguistic difference, firstly, through a re-analysis of the Italian and Spanish reading latencies. After eliminating several between-study differences, we replicated the AoA effect in Spanish but not in Italian, and the frequency effect in Italian but not in Spanish. The cross-linguistic comparison could not equate stimulus imageability, therefore, secondly, we compared the Italian reading latencies with new Spanish reading latencies for imageability-matched words. We found frequency effects but neither an AoA effect nor a language by AoA interaction. We argue that the previously reported cross-linguistic difference in the AoA effect resulted from a between-study difference in stimulus imageability. More imageable words induced more semantic involvement in reading, yielding an AoA effect in Spanish.
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