Pseudo word

The articles non-word and pseudo- word overlap thematically. Help me to better differentiate or merge the articles (→  instructions ) . To do this, take part in the relevant redundancy discussion . Please remove this module only after the redundancy has been completely processed and do not forget to include the relevant entry on the redundancy discussion page{{ Done | 1 = ~~~~}}to mark. Herr-Schlauschlau 1:47 p.m. , Aug. 18, 2011 (CEST)

A pseudo-word represents a sequence of letters or sounds that follow the graphotactic or phonotactic rules of a certain language (e.g. German), but without having a meaning in this language. Pseudo-words therefore obey the language-specific rules of word formation and can be pronounced without any problems, but have no entry in the lexicon of this language.

Differentiation from related terms

The difference to non-words is that non-words violate the grapho- or phonotactic rules of the respective language. Pseudo-words are therefore words that could theoretically exist, whereas this is excluded for non-words. Houses would thus be a word, Häsure a pseudo- word and Hrsäeu a non-word. Pseudo-words and non-words are mainly used to study language processing in the brain.

Neurophysiological Findings

Words, pseudo-words and non-words differ in how they are processed in the brain. When examining the temporal processing of linguistic stimuli in the brain by means of event-related potentials (EKP) , the activation processes of words, pseudo-words and non-words are the same in the first approx. 400 ms. Approx. 400 ms after the presentation of the linguistic stimulus, however, there is a negative effect on words in the waveform of the EKP, the N400 effect . The N400 amplitude is more pronounced in pseudo-words than in words. No N400 activity exists for non-words. The N400 effect can thus be interpreted as a search activity in the mental lexicon . The search is not carried out for non-words, but quickly leads to a result for words. In the case of pseudo-words, the search is intensive but inconclusive. This is reinforced by findings that show that the N400 amplitude is also more pronounced in rare or uncommon words.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christian Stetter: On a theory of orthography. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1980, ISBN 3-484-31099-5 .
2. ^ Gert Rickheit, Theo Herrmann, Werner Deutsch: Psycholinguistics: an international manual. de Gruyter, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-11-916557-3 .
3. ↑ C. Van Petten: Words and sentences: Event-related brain potential measures. In: Psychophysiology . 32, 1995, PMID 8524986 , pp. 511-525.