A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning. It is a specific type of nonce word, or even more narrowly a nonsense word, composed of a combination of phonemes which nevertheless conforms to the language's phonotactic rules. It is thus a kind of vocable: utterable but meaningless. Such words lacking a meaning in a certain language or absent in any text corpus or dictionary can be the result of (the interpretation of) a truly random signal, but there will often be an underlying deterministic source, as is the case for examples like jabberwocky and galumph (both coined in a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll), dord (a ghost word published due to a mistake), ciphers, and typos. A string of nonsensical words may be described as gibberish. Word salad, in contrast, may contain legible and intelligible words but without semantic or syntactic correlation or coherence.
Characteristics
Within linguistics, a pseudoword is defined specifically as respecting the phonotactic restrictions of a language. That is, it does not include sounds or series of sounds that do not exist in that language: it is easily pronounceable for speakers of the language. When reading pseudowords, some cite the need to reflect on the real words that are "friendly" and "unfriendly". For instance, "tave" can be read easily due to the number of its friendly words such as cave, pave, and wave. Also, when written down, a pseudoword does not include strings of characters that are not permissible in the spelling of the target language. "Vonk" is a pseudoword in English, while "dfhnxd" is not. The latter is an example of a nonword. Nonwords are contrasted with pseudowords in that they are not pronounceable, and, by that, their spelling could not be the spelling of a real word. Pseudowords are created in one of two ways. The first method involves changing at least one letter in a word. The second method uses various bigrams and trigrams and combines them. Both methods evaluate certain criteria to compare the pseudoword to another real word. The more that a given pseudoword matches a word in terms of criteria, the stronger the word is. Pseudowords are also sometimes called wug words in the context of psycholinguistic experiments. This is because wug [wʌg] was one such pseudoword used by Jean Berko Gleason in her wug test 1958 experiments. Words like wug, which could have been a perfectly acceptable word in English but is not due to an accidental gap, were presented to children. The experimenter would then prompt the children to create a plural for wug, which was almost invariably wugs [wʌgz]. The experiments were designed to see if English morphophonemics would be applied by children to novel words. They revealed that even at a very young age, children have already internalized many of the complex features of their language. A logatome is a short pseudoword or just a syllable which is used in acoustic experiments to examine speech recognition.
Linguistic studies Experiments involving pseudonyms have led to the discovery of the pseudoword effect, a phenomenon where non-words that are similar in spelling to real words give rise to more confusion, or "hits and false alarms," than other similar-spelling yet real words. This is theorized to be caused by human's use of semantic meaning to differentiate between words that look similar, and that the pseudoword effect is caused by a familiarity-based process. Pseudowords are also often used in studies involving aphasia and other cognitive deficits. Particularly Broca’s aphasia has been associated with difficulties in processing pseudowords. In aphasia studies, they are often used to measure syllable frequency by having patients attempt to pronounce them. Also, patients with left hemisphere damage (LHD) tend to have significantly greater difficulty writing pseudowords than those with right hemisphere damage. This specific deficit is known as the lexicality effect. It occurs in the presence of perisylvian, rather than extrasylvian, damage in the left hemisphere.
Pseudowords and reading ability In testing the ability of beginner readers, pseudowords are used due to their characteristics as pronounceable non-words. Those with reading disabilities have a more difficult time pronouncing pseudowords. Because pseudowords are made using common syllables, it might be obvious that trouble in pronouncing them would be connected to trouble pronouncing real words. From these findings, nonsense word fluency is now considered to be a basic early literacy indicator. A standardized test for beginning readers, Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), shows high scores in pseudoword pronunciation being correlated with high scores in the reading of authentic words. Due to these findings, often pseudowords are used to train early readers to strengthen their morphological knowledge. There is evidence that suggests that higher scores on these tests, such as the Word-Pseudoword Reading Competence Test are highly correlated with other more general standardized tests, such as the Test for School Achievement and its subtests. Pseudoword pronunciation and spelling are associated with general reading comprehension and, more importantly, general, education-based achievement.
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