"psuedo-words"

お母さんと子の関係には不思議なことが沢山あるなと思いました。

What Happens in Kids’ Brains When They Hear Mom’s Voice

Kids can recognize their mothers’ voices in less than a second, a new study shows. And those whose brains show more connections when they hear their moms’ voice are more socially gifted than those whose don’t.

The study, which was conducted at Stanford University and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, looked at the brain activity of 24 normally developing children between the ages of 7 and 12, as they listened to recordings of various female voices saying nonsense words. Some of the words were spoken by the child’s mother and others were said by another mother not related to the child.

While researchers have long known that children are much more aware of their mothers’ voices than other sounds, and that maternal voices play an important role in kids’ brain, social and emotional development, “we don’t really know what brain circuits are selectively engaged in children in response to their mother’s voice,” says the paper’s author Daniel Abrams, a researcher in the psychiatry department at Stanford. “We thought it would be important to know how the brain organizes itself around a biologically relevant sound source like mom.”

First the researchers tested to see if kids could recognize their own mother’s voice saying psuedo-words. (For those who wish to try this at home, the words were teebudishawlt, keebudishawlt, and peebudishawlt.) The kids got it right 97% of the time, even though they heard the voice for less than a second.

（以下省略）

http://time.com/4328353/kids-brains-moms-voice/

今回取り上げる表現は、psuedo-wordsです。もうお気づきの方もいるかもしれませんが、このpsuedoはおそらく誤字であると思います。辞書やインターネットで調べても全く見当たりませんでした。しかしpseudoという単語ならあるようなので、こちらが正しいものだとして調べてみました。

Oxford Dictionary of English (Second Edition Reserved, Oxford University Press)で調べたところ、pseudo-で” supposed or purporting to be but not really so; false; not genuine ”とのことでした。

また『ジーニアス英和辞典』（第五版、大修館）で調べたところ、「偽りの，仮の，疑似の」と載っておりました。

おそらくpseudo-words(psuedo-words) は、「疑似の言葉」つまり「実際には存在しない言葉」のような意味になるかと思います。

ちなみにteebudishawltなどの言葉は、存在しないようです。

もしかしたらpsuedoは存在しない言葉として、わざと使用したのかもしれませんね。（Gomez）