Scrabbling Syllables into Words: Wordlikeness Norms for European Portuguese Auditory Pseudowords

Auditory pseudowords are widely used in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience, but their construction requires control of sublexical familiarity and careful characterization of how acoustic cue manipulations may shift perceived lexical plausibility. Here we introduce the Minho Pseudoword Wordlikeness Ratings (MPWR), the first normative dataset of wordlikeness judgments for European Portuguese (EP) auditory trisyllabic CV pseudowords, and evaluate whether adding a localized F0-based prominence cue modulates wordlikeness beyond distributional familiarity. One hundred and twenty pseudowords were assembled from naturally produced syllables drawn from the Minho Spoken Syllable Pool (MSSP) and recorded under uniform conditions. Each item was implemented in three token types with constant segmental content: a flat baseline and two F0-enhanced versions (+15%) targeting either the penultimate or final syllable. Native EP listeners ( N = 101) provided wordlikeness ratings on a 7-point scale. MSSP-derived indices quantified pseudoword syllable familiarity (SWI All , SWI N3 ) and stress-position propensity for the targeted syllable (SPP marked ). Ratings were intentionally low overall yet showed substantial item-to-item variability. F0 enhancement produced a small but reliable decrease in wordlikeness relative to flat tokens, with no reliable difference between penultimate and final targeting positions. SWI All robustly predicted ratings, whereas SPP marked added little explanatory value. MPWR provides a practical EP resource for selecting and matching auditory pseudowords using normative wordlikeness ratings and transparent corpus-based descriptors.