# Syllable-, Bigram-, and Morphology-Driven Pseudoword Generation in Greek
## 4 Evaluation of Pseudowords
For example, the word \(\varphi o\varphi o_{\zeta}\) ['foros] 'tax' has phonological neighbors created through various operations: (a) deletion: \(\varphi o\varphi o_{\zeta}\) ['foros] \(\to\)\(\varphi oo_{\zeta}\) ['oros]'mountain' (deletion of initial \(\varphi\) /\(\ell\)/); (b) replacement: \(\varphi o\varphi o_{\zeta}\) ['foros] \(\to\)\(\chi\)\(\varphi o_{\zeta}\) ['xoros]'space' (replacing \(\varphi\) /\(\ell\)/ with \(\chi\) /\(\chi\)/\(\ell\)); (c) insertion: \(\varphi o\varphi o_{\zeta}\) ['foros] \(\to\)\(\varphi o\varphi o_{\zeta}\) ['foros] 'burden' (insertion of \(\tau\) /\(\ell\)/ before final \(o_{\zeta}\) /\(o\)/\(\ell\)); (d) transposition: \(\varphi o\varphi o_{\zeta}\) ['foros] \(\to\)\(\rho o\varphi o_{\zeta}\) ['roos] 'dusky grouper' (change in the position of \(\rho\) /\(\ell\)/). 5. _Phonological Levenshtein distance 20_ (PLD20; [50]) calculates phonological similarity by calculating the phonological edits (insertions, deletions, substitutions, or transpositions) required to change one word into the 20 most similar ones [52]. Having outlined these main parameters, we applied them systematically to evaluate pseudowords generated by SyBig-r-Morph. We selected parameters \(a\) and \(b\) to measure bigram tokens and type frequency, and parameters \(c\), \(d\), and \(e\) to control similiarity to real words. This selection guarantees that our pseudowords align with the Greek phonotactic system without closely resembling actual words, thus preventing any direct connections to existing words that might influence speaker choices. We conducted comprehensive assessments across different grammatical categories (e.g., nouns, verbs) to demonstrate the practical application of these criteria, with a particular focus on noun evaluation reported here. Table 2 presents a sample of the pseudonouns and their corresponding parameter values to illustrate the application of our criteria. All pseudonouns were produced from SyBig-r-Morph with the Similarity Threshold set to 0.8. We decided on this value because, with lower values, the pseudonouns were too dissimilar to existing nouns, and with higher values, they were too similar to existing ones. While these initial results demonstrated the tool's effectiveness, given that all nouns fell within Clean's phonotactic well-formedness range, we recognized that even more rigorous, noun-specific criteria would better ensure experimental validity. To achieve this precision, we developed enhanced evaluation standards tailored specifically to Greek noun phonotactics. We extracted all di- and trisyllabic nouns from A-Clean. Following the methodology of [PERSON] et al. [53] and [PERSON] [20], we calculated the mean (M) and standard deviation (SD) for each of the five parameters for the total number of 5326 trisyllabic nouns across all noun classes present in A-Clean. The lower bound was established using the formula _Mean \(-\) 2 SD_, whereas _Mean + 2 SD_ defined the upper limit. This process allowed us to precisely determine the numerical ranges in which the values of A-Clean nouns naturally fell. Table 3 shows the admissible ranges of all five parameters. For trisyllabic nouns, the mean logarithmic bigram token frequency was calculated to be 0.53, with a corresponding standard deviation of 0.365. By applying the formula [M \(-\) 2 SD to M + 2 SD], the acceptable range of values for trisyllabic pseudonouns was determined to be within 0 and 1.260 (M \(-\) 2 SD = \(-\)0.2 and M + 2 SD = 1.260). Similar calculations were performed for the remaining parameters. The same process was applied to disyllabic nouns. Having established these refined criteria, we applied them to a focused evaluation of trisyllabic pseudonouns ending in -\(\infty\). Table 4 demonstrates how a representative sample of ten pseudowords performed against these stringent parameters, with shaded rows indicating words that fell outside acceptable ranges. Pseudowords exceeding these thresholds were excluded from experimental materials.