How would you pronounce the word DRICHE?
Maybe it sounds like dritch, rhyming with itch. Or, maybe more like drysh. Or maybe you hear something else entirely!
Of course, DRICHE is not a real English word. With that in mind, it raises the question: how did you come up with an answer?
That question is one reason researchers are so interested in pseudowords.
A pseudoword is a made-up word that seems like it could be a word. It follows the general sound and spelling patterns of a language, even though it does not have a meaning and is not stored in memory as a real word. So BLEASE, DRAVE, or PLUDE count as pseudowords in English. They are not real words, but they are pronounceable and word-like. By contrast, something like XQTPRB is not usually what researchers mean by a pseudoword.
Pseudowords are useful because they let us ask a simple but powerful question: what do people do when they cannot rely on their memory of having already learned the word?
If you read a familiar word like cat, you may simply recognize it. You have seen it before, and memorized its spelling, pronunciation, and meaning. But if you read jat, you cannot recognize it as a known word (because it isn’t!). You have to use more general knowledge about how letters and sounds go together in English.
This kind of knowledge is often called sublexical knowledge. “Lexical” refers to whole words in your mental dictionary, or lexicon. “Sublexical” refers to units smaller than whole words: letters, sounds, letter combinations, rhymes, syllables, and the links among them.
That is why pseudowords have historically been important in research and diagnosis–they are often used to study reading, spelling, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and response to intervention. If someone can read familiar words but struggles with pseudowords, that tells us something about their ability to generalize beyond memorized words. If someone can spell real words but struggles to spell new, made-up words, that tells us something about how they map sounds to letters.
But there is a catch!
Pseudowords are often treated as if they have “correct” answers. Sometimes that is a reasonable approximation. If I show English readers JAT, most will probably pronounce it to rhyme with cat, hat, and sat.
But English is not always so cooperative. The same letter can have different sounds, as in PINT versus MINT, and CHORE versus CHOIR. And some spelling patterns — let us not even get started on OUGH (dough, rough, thought, through…)— seem like they were designed to drive you mad.
So when someone reads or spells a pseudoword, there may be more than one plausible response. A spoken pseudoword like /plud/ could be spelled PLUDE, by analogy to words like rude or dude. But, it could also plausibly be PLOOD, or PLEWED, or still other options. What’s so important is that these alternatives are not random, they come from real English words that you may know.
That is the point I want to emphasize: pseudoword responses are not just a test of whether someone knows the “rules.” In fact, THERE ARE NO “RULES”! Much of what we know about reading and spelling is learned from experience with real words. Over time, we learn that some sound-spelling patterns are common, others are rare, and some depend on where they occur in the word or what other sounds and letters surround them.
This means that your response to a pseudoword reflects the words you know–and because people do not all have exactly the same language experience, they may not all give the same answer. That doesn’t make one person correct and the other one wrong–it is just a reflection of different experiences: different vocabularies, different accents, different slang.
That variability is not just noise–it is an important phenomenon that tells us something about how we learn to read and write.
So, pseudowords are useful for diagnosis, yes. They tell us about decoding, spelling, and sublexical processing. But they also tell us something more basic and more interesting: how people generalize from the words they already know.
A pseudoword does not contain one correct answer. It contains a question:
Given the words in your head, what does this possible word seem like it should be?
References
Wiley, R. W., Key, K. M., & Purcell, J. J. (2023). Pseudoword spelling: insights into sublexical representations and lexical interactions. Cognitive Neuropsychology.
Wiley, R. W., Singh, S., Baig, Y., Key, K., & Purcell, J. J. (2024). The English Sublexical Toolkit: Methods for indexing sound–spelling consistency. Behavior Research Methods.
Purcell, J.J., Wiley, R.W., Shea, J., Rosenberg, S., Martin, R., & Rapp, B. Lesion mapping of the spelling system’s central cognitive functions. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 37(1). doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_02250.