Using Character-Grams to Automatically Generate Pseudowords and How to Evaluate Them

This paper provides a practical solution to the problem of generating (good) pseudowords, which are commonly used in vocabulary testing and experimental research in applied linguistics, and introduces an empirically founded solution to evaluating the suitability of pseudowords for different tasks. In the first part of the paper, we propose a novel way of generating pseudowords—a character-gram chaining algorithm. A major advantage of the...