# Syllable-, Bigram-, and Morphology-Driven Pseudoword Generation in Greek
## 2 Related Work
### Constructing Pseudowords in Greek: Methodological Considerations  
While a substantial body of work has been dedicated to developing software tools for languages such as English, French, and German, the same cannot be said for Greek, which presents unique challenges such as unpredictable stress (e.g., [16; 17]) and rich affixation. To date, the literature on Greek has presented different manual methods for pseudoword construction, which vary depending on the research focus. A common practice of pseudoword construction involves changing a real word by altering letters or segments. [PERSON] et al. [34] created pseudo-stems by changing the first or first two consonants of an existing word to examine the lexical access of verbs and nouns in Greek. The same method was employed by [PERSON] et al. [35], who investigated the development of morphological awareness in Greek children. Pseudowords were created by replacing vowels and consonants in the stem of actual words while preserving the original existing word's phonological structure, stress pattern, and inflectional ending. Similarly, in their study on the acquisition of past tense by children with specific language impairment, [PERSON] & [PERSON] [36] constructed pseudo-verbs based on real verbs by changing two consonants in terms of place or manner of articulation. In [PERSON] & [PERSON]'s [37] research on morphosyntactic processing, pseudowords were created by selecting a noun as the base to form a verb instead of the expected verbal root. Consequently, the root of the constructed word is joined with suffixes that differ from those it usually combines with in existing words. [PERSON] et al. [12; 13], in their study on stress assignment in Greek reading, created novel words by modifying vowels and consonants in terms of various features, including place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing. They assigned distinct points for each change to assess the degree of modification applied to existing words when creating pseudowords. The cumulative change score served as a metric to evaluate the similarity of resulting pseudowords to actual words, allowing their classification into low- and high-similarity groups. Native speakers then evaluated these words and attempted to identify the original word. Based on the success or failure of the identification task, the researchers selected suitable pseudowords for use in their experimental tasks. While the primary objective in some of these studies is to reduce the influence of lexical effects by generating pseudowords that bear little resemblance to actual words, an important factor is often overlooked, namely, the phonological structure and, primarily, the frequency of segmental or syllabic strings that the pseudoword consists of [38]. Defining this factor can be challenging without the help of specialized tools or software, impeding the quantification or assessment of phonological well-formedness. A recent body of research [20; 39; 40] has considered quantifying measures related to the phonological structure of words. These studies use psycholinguistic resources, such as the _Num Tool_[41], which is described in Section 4, to assess their manually constructed pseudonouns and pseudo-verbs. The use of specialized software for pseudoword creation in Greek is practically non-existent except for UniPseudo, as discussed in Section 2.1. This tool was developed to create pseudowords in numerous languages, including Greek, based on a user-provided wordlist or the associated _WordLex_ corpus [42; 43]. We used the software and employed the embedded source database, instructing the tool to create forty pseudowords, twenty of which had four characters and the remaining twenty had six characters. The algorithm constructs pseudowords using bigrams and/or trigrams. We also set the algorithm to limit consecutive consonants to two and include only one letter with a diacritic. The latter condition was critical because Greek orthography employs an acute accent to indicate stress on the vowel.