New words are often introduced into languages from borrowings or neologisms. Pseudowords (possible words of a language that have not yet been assigned meaning) are used in many experiments to test aspects of speech perception. However, what we know about the perception of pseudowords is relatively limited. In this study, we investigate word likeness ratings of pseudowords on a 1–7 scale. A total of 659 listeners responded to sets of 200 pseudowords from an item list of 9599 English-sounding pseudowords varying in number of syllables and morphological complexity. We analyze the listeners' responses with the following predictors: phonotactic predictability, duration, phonological neighborhood density, phonological uniqueness point, pseudo morphological complexity, and acoustic distinctiveness. We analyze the ordinal data to identify how these predictors influence listeners’ ratings. We also take average word likeness ratings of the pseudowords and use them to predict a different set of listeners’ reaction times in a lexical decision task. In this presentation, we discuss what properties of the pseudowords influence what makes them seem more word-like or not and how word-likeness affects auditory word recognition.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
October 2023
October 01 2023
Correlates of word likeness in the perception of pseudowords
Benjamin V. Tucker;
Benjamin V. Tucker
Commun. Sci. and Disord., Northern Arizona Univ., 4-32 Assiniboia Hall, Univ. AB, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E7, Canada, [email protected]
Search for other works by this author on:
Matthew C. Kelley
Matthew C. Kelley
English, George Mason Univ., Seattle, WA
Search for other works by this author on:
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 154, A158 (2023)
Citation
Benjamin V. Tucker, Matthew C. Kelley; Correlates of word likeness in the perception of pseudowords. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 October 2023; 154 (4_supplement): A158. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0023117
Download citation file:
150
Views
Citing articles via
All we know about anechoic chambers
Michael Vorländer
A survey of sound source localization with deep learning methods
Pierre-Amaury Grumiaux, Srđan Kitić, et al.
Does sound symbolism need sound?: The role of articulatory movement in detecting iconicity between sound and meaning
Mutsumi Imai, Sotaro Kita, et al.
Related Content
Multilingual spoken word recognition: A megastudy approach
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. (March 2023)
Closure duration versus f0 perturbation as a cue to underlying stops for the American English intervocalic flap
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. (March 2024)
Speaker-listener dialect differences and spoken word recognition: Evidence from massive auditory lexical decision
J Acoust Soc Am (March 2019)
Reducing phonetically incomplete application of tone three sandhi to articulatory implementation
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. (October 2020)
Auditory lexical decision in the wild
J Acoust Soc Am (September 2018)