Wuggy: A multilingual pseudoword generator

Abstract

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., beard [inconsistent with heard]) increased. Because of the impact of the nonwords on lexical decision performance, there is general agreement among researchers that nonwords should be legal nonwords, unless there are theoretical reasons to use illegal nonwords. Legal nonwords that conform to the orthographic and phonological patterns of a language are also called pseudowords.Although the requirement of pseudowords solves many problems for the creation of nonwords in the lexical decision task, there are additional considerations that must be taken into account. Because lexical decision is, in essence, a signal detection task (e.g., Ratcliff, Gomez, & McKoon, 2004), participants in a lexical decision task not only base their decision on whether the stimuli belong to the language, they also rely on other cues that help to differentiate between the word and nonword stimuli. In the same way that participants learn ties in apparently random materials generated on the basis of an underlying grammar (i.e., the phenomenon of implicit learning; Reber, 1989), so are participants susceptible to systematic differences between the word trials (requiring a "yes" response) and the nonword trials (requiring a "no" response). They exploit these biases to optimize their responses. Chumbley and Balota's (1984) study provides an example of this process. Because of an oversight, in their Experiment 2, the nonwords were on aver...

Non-cognate translation priming effects in the same–different task: evidence for the impact of “higher level” information

“…Thus, there were 50 word pairs in the related condition and 50 word pairs in the unrelated condition in each list. An additional set of 100 orthographically legal non-words in English was also created using Wuggy (Keuleers & Brysbaert, 2010). These non-words were preceded by a Spanish prime word of the same length (plus/minus one) as the target English non-word.…”

SUBTLEX-NL: A new measure for Dutch word frequency based on film subtitles

“…On the basis of simulations with the British National Corpus, Brysbaert and New estimated that, when used to predict word processing times, larger corpora yield significantly better frequency estimates up to a corpus size of about 16 million words, but that, for larger corpus sizes, the gains become vanishingly small if the corpus has been well sampled. 2 The Wuggy pseudoword generator (Keuleers & Brysbaert, 2010) was used to construct a corresponding pseudoword for each word in the experiment. Each pseudoword differed from the reference word by one subsyllabic segment (i.e., the onset, nucleus, or coda) per syllable.…”

Grapheme coding in L2: How do L2 learners process new graphemes?

“…All pseudoword stimuli were constructed using the Wuggy pseudoword generator (Keuleers & Brysbaert, 2010) and were five-letter monosyllables. The two critical target letters were the vowels A and O and they 2 Many participants from Experiment 1 could not be assessed on this test of vocabulary due to testing problems and so, comparisons of proficiency scores between experiments 1 and 2 cannot be provided.…”