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A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain
language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
, while in fact it has no meaning. It is a specific type of
nonce word In linguistics, a nonce word—also called an occasionalism—is any word (lexeme), or any sequence of sounds or letters, created for a single occasion or utterance but not otherwise understood or recognized as a word in a given languag ...
, or even more narrowly a nonsense word, composed of a combination of
phonemes A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...
which nevertheless conform to the language's phonotactic rules. It is thus a kind of
vocable In the broadest sense of the word, a vocable (from ) is any identifiable utterance or writing, such as a word or term, that is fixed by their language and culture. The use of the term for words in the broad sense is archaic and the term is instea ...
: utterable but meaningless. Such
word A word is a basic element of language that carries semantics, meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguist ...
s lacking a meaning in a certain language or absent in any
text corpus In linguistics and natural language processing, a corpus (: corpora) or text corpus is a dataset, consisting of natively digital and older, digitalized, language resources, either annotated or unannotated. Annotated, they have been used in corp ...
or
dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...
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 "Jabberwocky" is a Nonsense verse, nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock". It was included in his 1871 novel ''Through the Looking-Glass'', the sequel to ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' ...
'' and '' galumph'' (both coined in a nonsense poem by
Lewis Carroll Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet, mathematician, photographer and reluctant Anglicanism, Anglican deacon. His most notable works are ''Alice ...
), '' dord'' (a
ghost word In folklore, a ghost is the soul or spirit of a dead person or non-human animal that is believed by some people to be able to appear to the living. In ghostlore, descriptions of ghosts vary widely, from an invisible presence to translucen ...
published due to a mistake), ciphers, and typos. A string of nonsensical words may be described as
gibberish Gibberish, also known as jibber-jabber or gobbledygook, is speech that is (or appears to be) nonsense: ranging across speech sounds that are not actual words, pseudowords, language games and specialized jargon that seems nonsensical to outsid ...
. Word salad, in contrast, may contain legible and intelligible words but without semantic or
syntactic In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency ...
correlation or coherence.


Characteristics

Within
linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
, 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'' ÊŒgwas 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 In linguistics an accidental gap, also known as a gap, paradigm gap, accidental lexical gap, lexical gap, lacuna, or hole in the pattern, is a potential word, word sense, morpheme, or other form that does not exist in some language despite being t ...
, were presented to children. The experimenter would then prompt the children to create a plural for ''wug'', which was almost invariably ''wugs'' ÊŒgz 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 Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...
.


Linguistic studies

Experiments involving pseudonyms have led to the discovery of the pseudoword effect, a phenomenon where non-words that are similar orthographically to real words give rise to more confusion, or "hits and false alarms," than other real words which are also similar in orthography. The reasoning behind this is focused on semantic meaning. Semantics help us more quickly differentiate between words that look similar, leading to the conclusion 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 Expressive aphasia (also known as Broca's aphasia) is a type of aphasia characterized by partial loss of the ability to produce language ( spoken, manual, or written), although comprehension generally remains intact. A person with expressive ap ...
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.


Nonsense syllables

A logatome or nonsense syllable is a short pseudoword consisting most of the time of just one
syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...
which has no meaning of its own. Examples of English logatomes are the nonsense words or . Like other pseudowords, logatomes obey all the phonotactic rules of a specific language. Logatomes are used in particular in acoustic experiments. They are also used in experiments in the psychology of learning as a way to examine speech recognition. and in
experimental psychology Experimental psychology is the work done by those who apply Experiment, experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ Research participant, human participants and Animal testing, anim ...
, especially the psychology of learning and
memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembe ...
. Nonsense syllables were first introduced by
Hermann Ebbinghaus Hermann Ebbinghaus (24 January 1850 – 26 February 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory. Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was the first person to describe the learnin ...
Ebbinghaus, H. (1964). ''Memory''. New York: Dover. (Originally published 1885.) in his experiments on the learning of lists. His intention was that they would form a standard stimulus so that experiments would be reproducible. However, with increasing use it became apparent that different nonsense syllables were learned at very different rates, even when they had the same superficial structure. GlazeGlaze, J. A. (1928). The association value of non-sense syllables. ''Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology, 35'', 255-269. introduced the concept of association value to describe these differences, which turned out to be reliable between people and situations. Since Glaze's time, experiments using nonsense syllables typically control association value in order to reduce variability in results between stimuli. Nonsense syllables can vary in structure. The most used are the so-called CVC syllables, composed of a consonant, a vowel, and a consonant. These have the advantage that nearly all are pronounceable, that is, they fit the phonotactics of any language that uses
closed syllables A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...
, such as English and German. They are often described as "CVC trigrams", reflecting their three-letter structure. Obviously, many other structures are possible, and can be described on the same principles, e.g. VC, VCV, CVCV. But the CVC trigrams have been studied most intensively; for example, Glaze determined association values for 2019 of them. The term nonsense syllable is widely used to describe non-lexical vocables used in music, most notably in
scat singing Originating in vocal jazz, scat singing or scatting is vocal Musical improvisation, improvisation with Non-lexical vocables in music, wordless vocables, Pseudoword#Nonsense syllables, nonsense syllables or without words at all. In scat singing, t ...
but also in many other forms of vocal music. Although such usages do not invoke the technical issues about structure and associability that are of concern in psychology, the essential meaning of the term is the same.


See also

*
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*'' Glokaya kuzdra'' * Gostak *''
Hapax legomenon In corpus linguistics, a ''hapax legomenon'' ( also or ; ''hapax legomena''; sometimes abbreviated to ''hapax'', plural ''hapaxes'') is a word or an Fixed expression, expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written re ...
'' *
Language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and s ...
*
Lorem ipsum ''Lorem ipsum'' ( ) is a dummy or placeholder text commonly used in graphic design, publishing, and web development. Its purpose is to permit a page layout to be designed, independently of the copy (publishing), copy that will subsequently pop ...
*
Neologism In linguistics, a neologism (; also known as a coinage) is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has achieved popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. Most definitively, a word can be considered ...
*
Placeholder name Placeholder names are intentionally overly generic and ambiguous terms referring to things, places, or people, the names of which or of whom do not actually exist; are temporarily forgotten, or are unimportant; or in order to avoid stigmat ...
*
Speaking in tongues Speaking in tongues, also known as glossolalia, is an activity or practice in which people utter words or speech-like sounds, often thought by believers to be languages unknown to the speaker. One definition used by linguists is the fluid voc ...


References

{{reflist Linguistics Phonology Phonotactics Psychology experiments Cognitive psychology Psychology of learning Experimental psychology Lexicology