How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age

Pseudowords play an important role in psycholinguistic experiments, either because they are required for performing tasks, such as lexical decision, or because they are the main focus of interest, such as in nonword-reading and nonce-inflection studies. We present a pseudoword generator that improves on current methods. It allows for the generation of written polysyllabic pseudowords that obey a given language's phonotactic constraints. Given a word or nonword template, the algorithm can quickly generate pseudowords that match the template in subsyllabic structure and transition frequencies without having to search through a list with all possible candidates. Currently, the program is available for Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish, Serbian, and Basque, and, with little effort, it can be expanded to other languages.