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Pseudowords play an important role in psycholinguistic experiments, either because they are required for performing tasks, such as lexical decision, or because they are the main focus of interest, such as in nonword-reading and nonce-inflection studies. We present a pseudoword generator that improves on current methods. It allows for the generation of written polysyllabic pseudowords that obey a given language's phonotactic constraints. Given a word or nonword template, the algorithm can quickly generate pseudowords that match the template in subsyllabic structure and transition frequencies without having to search through a list with all possible candidates. Currently, the program is available for Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish, Serbian, and Basque, and, with little effort, it can be expanded to other languages.
Nonwords are essential in lexical decision tasks in which participants are confronted with strings of letters or sounds and have to decide whether the stimulus forms an existing word. Together with word naming, semantic classification, perceptual identification, and eye-movement tracking during reading, the lexical decision task is one of the core instruments in the psycholinguist's toolbox for the study of word processing.
Although researchers are concerned particularly with the quality of their word stimuli (because their investigation depends on them), there is plenty of evidence that the nature of the nonwords also has a strong impact on lexical decision performance. As a rule, the more dissimilar the nonwords are to the words, the faster are the lexical decision times and the smaller is the impact of word features such as word frequency, age of acquisition, and spelling-sound consistency (e.g., Borowsky & Masson, 1996; Gerhand & Barry, 1999; Ghyselinck, Lewis, & Brysbaert, 2004; Gibbs & Van Orden, 1998). For instance, in Gibbs and Van Orden (Experiment 1), lexical decision times to the words were shortest (496 msec) when the nonwords were illegal letter strings (i.e., letter sequences, such as ldfa, that are not observed in the language), longer (558 msec) when the nonwords were legal letter strings (e.g., dilt), and still longer (698 msec) when the nonwords were pseudohomophones (i.e., sounding like real words, e.g., durt). At the same time, the difference in reaction times (RTs) between words with a consistent rhyme pronunciation (e.g., beech) and matched words with an inconsistent rhyme pronunciation (e.g.,...