The TIB, an Italian version of the National Adult Reading Test (NART), requires the subject to read out loud a list of Italian words with dominant (regular) and less frequent (irregular) stress patterns. This test was given to a group of forty-five patients with the diagnosis of dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) and to a matched control group. Both the NART and the TIB are based on the assumption that the ability to translate orthography into phonology is relatively unimpaired in DAT patients. Despite the different language characteristics on which the two tests are based, the present results largely replicate those found for the NART. Patients with mild and moderate DAT did not perform differently from matched controls on the TIB, while they were impaired on the NART. Patients with severe dementia, however, also failed in the TIB test.