Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

For a language learner, any new word is a pseudoword. Apseudoword is a string of of letters or phonemes that soundslike an existing word in a language, though it has no meaningin the lexicon. On the other hand, speakers are well aware ofpermissible phonemes, their frequencies and collocations intheir language due to the phonotactics inherent in thelanguage. For example, saktal is a pseudoword in Turkish,whereas szyan is not, due to Turkish phonotactics. This studyinvestigates the relationship between pseudoword letterformation and eye movement characteristics in reading. Inparticular, we examine the role of Turkish vowel harmony,middle-word consonant collocation, and word-initial andword-final consonants on eye movements with adult nativespeakers reading sentences that involve predesigned Turkishpseudowords. The results of an experiment with 34participants are indicative of the role of pseudowordformation on a set of eye movement parameters.