The recognition of spoken pseudowords

Matthew C. Kelley, Benjamin V. Tucker

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1169-1190
Number of pages22
JournalLanguage, Cognition and Neuroscience
Volume37
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

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

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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