How the brain responds to possible and impossible words: an MMN investigation of wordhood in English

Journal article

Pseudowords and nonwords have served as cornerstones of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research, allowing researchers to examine language processing in the absence of lexical- semantic activation. Such items can vary in the degree of phonotactic violation they contain (e.g., *blick, which conforms to English phonotactics, vs. **bnick, which includes the illicit onset cluster [bn]). To examine how graded violations modulate pseudoword processing, we employed an auditory oddball mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm with independent comparisons among English pseudowords ([krɛlz], [kreɪlz], [krɛls], and [kreɪls]). These stimuli spanned a continuum of wordhood violability, ranging from fully phonotactically licit forms to combinations that are impossible in English. Critically, these violations are not only reducible to the effects of individual segments but arise from the interaction between vowel quality and word-final structure, in that certain vowel–coda combinations cue morphological complexity, while others signal monomorphemic structure. We observed asymmetric MMN responses consistent with these combinatorial constraints, particularly for forms whose phonological patterns implied morphological structure. In addition, robust MMNs were elicited whenever the maximally illicit form served as the deviant, indicating a strong perceptual conflict. Together, these findings suggest that pseudoword processing reflects the cognisance of multiple phonological and morphophonological constraints rather than a simple distinction between possible and impossible words.

Authors: Wynne, H; Booth, J; Fritz, I; Lahiri, A

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Journal: Language Cognition and Neuroscience
• Acceptance date: 2026-09-08
• EISSN: 2327-3801
• ISSN: 2327-3798
• Language: English
• Keywords: morphology; pseudowords; nonwords; MMN; English; phonology