The recognition of spoken pseudowords

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Matthew C. Kelley
  • Benjamin V. Tucker

• Pseudowords are used as stimuli in many psycholinguistic experiments yet they, remain largely under-researched. To better understand the cognitive processing of pseudowords, we analysed the pseudoword responses in the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision megastudy data set. Linguistic characteristics that influence the processing of real English words – namely, phonotactic probability, phonological neighbourhood density, uniqueness point, and morphological complexity – were also found to influence the processing time of spoken pseudowords. Subsequently, we analysed how the linguistic characteristics of non-unique portions of pseudowords influenced processing time. We again found that the named linguistic characteristics affected processing time, highlighting the dynamicity of activation and competition. We argue these findings also speak to learning new words and spoken word recognition generally. We then discuss what aspects of pseudoword recognition a full model of spoken word recognition must account for. We finish with a re-description of the auditory lexical decision task in light of our results.

  This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience. Kelley, M. C., & Tucker, B. V. (2022). The recognition of spoken pseudowords. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 1-22.

• Date created

  2022-03-28

• Subjects / Keywords

  • phonetics
  • psycholinguistics
  • auditory lexical decision
  • spoken word recognition
  • pseudowords
  • mental lexicon

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-zfw9-p672

• License

  Attribution 4.0 International