# Syllable-, Bigram-, and Morphology-Driven Pseudoword Generation in Greek
## 1 Introduction  
A pseudoword is constructed with proper linguistic structure but lacks meaning [1]. Pseudowords adhere to a language's phonotactic and orthographic rules and are typically characterized by the absence of frequency statistics since they are not part of the language's lexicon [2]. Pseudowords are used in linguistic research by being integrated into lexical decision tasks, production and perception experiments, vocabulary evaluations, etc. For instance, in morphology experiments, the renowned pseudoword 'wug' is often used to assess the productivity of plural rules [3], revealing the implicit knowledge children have acquired about the morphology of their language, i.e., English. In a broader context, pseudowords have been extensively used in phonetic decoding [4] and visual word recognition, including lexical decision and naming tasks [5]. Furthermore, pseudowords help assess the credibility of learners' responses in non-native vocabulary tests [6; 7; 8; 9]. They can also function as stimuli to examine the mechanisms within cognitive models of reading [10; 11; 12; 13]. Pseudowords are also employed in standardized tests (e.g., _PAT\(-\)Phomological Awareness Test_, _TOWRE\(-\)Test of Word Reading Efficiency_) to assess a speaker's skills in phonological processing, decoding ability, and overall literacy [14; 15]. Several methods have been proposed for the construction of pseudowords, many of which are accompanied by databases and software applications designed to streamline pseudoword generation on a large scale. However, most of the methods applied for pseudoword construction, whether conducted manually or with the help of specific applications or software, come with certain limitations. For instance, they often require a high level of proficiency in the language and/or an in-depth understanding of its phonotactics, syllable structure, and orthographic conventions that researchers may not have. In the context of such experimental applications, achieving reliable results depends on the careful development of appropriate pseudowords. The pseudowords must conform to the phonotactic rules of the language in the sense that they could potentially be real words while also meeting the researchers' experiment-specific criteria. Depending on the nature of the experiment, these pseudowords may need, for example, to closely resemble high or low-frequency words or, conversely, avoid bearing too strong a resemblance to existing words. After first reviewing some existing approaches for generating pseudowords and the challenges they face at the empirical level, we introduce our proposal for constructing and evaluating pseudowords in Greek, a language lacking a concrete methodology for pseudoword construction. Specifically, we present _SyBig-r-Morph_, a tool we developed for pseudoword construction that uses syllables, bigrams, orthographic conventions, and morphological information to construct pseudowords. This application can serve as a valuable resource for experimental tasks aimed at studying the phonological characteristics of the language. In Greek, stress assignment is heavily determined by lexical factors, with any of the last three syllables of a phonological word potentially serving as a stress location, as exemplified by words like [0o.ri.vos] 'noise', [zo. 'yra.fos] 'painter', [po.ta. 'mos] 'river' [16; 17; 18]. For illustrative purposes in this article, we focus on constructing pseudonouns for experimental tasks that explore how young and adult Greek speakers apply stress rules. As suggested by relevant research [19; 20; 21], we anticipate that the distribution of the three grammatical stress patterns will be affected by the size and morphological class of the noun. Therefore, the following criteria are essential when constructing pseudonouns. Firstly, they must strictly adhere to the phonotactic rules of the specific language to prevent any resemblance to foreign words.