Dotare il sardo di dati normativi su età d’acquisizione, familiarità e accordo sul concetto: Uno studio preliminare con 50 figure di Snodgrass & Vanderwart (1980)

In the present work, some normative data specifically relating to the Sardinian language were obtained on a set of 50 pictures taken from the famous study by Snodgrass & Vanderwart (1980). The parameters on which these normative data were obtained are some of the most studied in the literature: Age of Acquisition (AoA), Familiarity (FAM), and Concept Agreement (CA). 106 Sardinian native speakers took part in the experiment, carried out completely in written form via an online platform. In addition to providing, for each of the 50 images, normative data on the aforementioned parameters, this work found that AoA and FAM are strongly negatively correlated indicators; a correlation was also observed between both these parameters and the Concept Agreement measure, although these correlations are decidedly more moderate. A comparison was also made between the results of this work and those of two studies that collected normative data for Italian on the same parameters: Nisi et al. (2000) and Dell’Acqua et al. (2000). It was observed that Sardinian participants judged the depicted objects as significantly more familiar, and they claimed that they had learned the words denoting those objects significantly earlier. As for the CA, on the other hand, the data on Italian show a significantly higher percentage on average. However, while for AoA and FAM a strong positive correlation was found between the data on Italian and those on Sardinian, the data on these two languages are clearly uncorrelated for CA, suggesting that the degree of ease in finding a valid name for a picture is dictated by different factors in a national language such as Italian compared to a local language such as Sardinian. More generally, this shows that, before carrying out picture-naming tasks in a given language, it is advisable to have specific normative data for that language, even if it is a minority language or a dialect.