Shared early pathways of word and pseudoword processing: Evidence from high-density electrocorticography

In psycholinguistic studies of lexical processing, language users’ responses to real words are often compared to novel pseudoword forms. The goal of these comparisons is to learn something about the architecture of the lexical processing system, by examining or inferring the processing pathways evoked by words, which have full phonological, lexical, grammatical, and semantic representations. These are compared to pseudowords, which are assumed to lack all linguistic information at levels higher than the phonological representation, due to their novel status. However, the precise nature of pseudoword representation is still a subject of inquiry, one that is critical to understanding precisely what is being isolated in the lexical processing system in experiments where words and pseudowords are compared. The present study contributes to this line of research by providing data on the neural processing of words and pseudowords in an auditory listening task.