  The generation of meaningless "words" matching certain statistical and/or
linguistic criteria is frequently needed for experimental purposes in
Psycholinguistics. Such stimuli receive the name of pseudowords or nonwords in
the Cognitive Neuroscience literatue. The process for building nonwords
sometimes has to be based on linguistic units such as syllables or morphemes,
resulting in a numerical explosion of combinations when the size of the
nonwords is increased. In this paper, a reactive tabu search scheme is proposed
to generate nonwords of variables size. The approach builds pseudowords by
using a modified Metaheuristic algorithm based on a local search procedure
enhanced by a feedback-based scheme. Experimental results show that the new
algorithm is a practical and effective tool for nonword generation.
