A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning.
Such words lacking a meaning in a certain language or absent in any text corpus or dictionary 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 and galumph (both coined in a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll), dord (a ghost word published due to a mistake), ciphers, and typos.
[3] For instance, "tave" can be read easily due to the number of its friendly words such as cave, pave, and wave.
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.
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.
[9] In testing the ability of beginner readers, pseudowords are used due to their characteristics as pronounceable non-words.
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.
[11] Due to these findings, often pseudowords are used to train early readers to strengthen their morphological knowledge.
Glaze[16] 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.
These have the advantage that nearly all are pronounceable, that is, they fit the phonotactics of any language that uses closed syllables, such as English and German.
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.