The recognition of spoken pseudowords

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.

KEYWORDS:

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

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the attendees of the NorthWest Phonetics & Phonology Conference 2017, the Acoustics '17 Boston Conference, and the Western Conference on Linguistics 2017 for their feedback on various versions of this project. We would also like to thank Lou Boves and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 435-2014-0678].