Fast syntax in the brain: Electrophysiological evidence from the rapid parallel visual presentation paradigm (RPVP).

Abstract

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The transposed-word effect revisited: the role of syntax in word position coding

“…"you that read worry"). This novel effect has been consistently found in follow-up investigations (Pegado & Grainger, 2019Snell & Grainger, 2019b;Wen et al, 2021). As explained in previous studies, the transposed-word effect is assumed to be driven by a combination of noisy bottom-up encoding of word order and the operation of top-down sentence-level syntactic constraints.…”

“…Further evidence in line with Snell and colleagues' proposal of interactive processing between word identities and sentence-level structures is the sentence superiority effect observed with the Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation (RPVP) procedure (Declerck et al, 2020;Wen et al, 2019Wen et al, , 2021. The first demonstration of a sentence superiority effect using RPVP came from .…”

“…Although words within a sentence can be fixated out of order under the assumption of serial processing, it is generally agreed that parallel processing is more susceptible to incorrect word ordering. It is apparent that the transposed-word effect is a clear manifestation of incorrect word ordering, thus providing support for the parallel processing view (Mirault et al, 2018;Pegado & Grainger, 2019Snell & Grainger, 2019b;Wen et al, 2021). According to Snell et al's (2017Snell et al's ( , 2018 model of parallel orthographic processing and reading, there are two mechanisms that contribute to transposed-word effects.…”

“…The sentence superiority effect is interpreted as a reflection of parallel word processing which generates an elementary sentence-level representation in grammatical sequences, and this syntactic representation then influences on-going word processing via feedback connections. This interpretation has been further supported by two electrophysiological studies using either the same word-in-sequence identification task (Wen et al, 2019 ) or a grammatical decision task (Wen et al, 2021 ) combined with the RPVP procedure, both of which revealed an N400 reduction in grammatical sequences relative to scrambled sequences. This N400 reduction is assumed to reflect facilitatory feedback to word identities from sentence-level representations which are present in grammatical sequences due to parallel processing.…”

Why do readers fail to notice word transpositions, omissions, and repetitions? A review of recent evidence and theory

“…One relevant ERP study is by Wen et al. (2021), who used items adopted from the original transposed‐word study (Mirault et al., 2018), and showed a reduced N400 for transposed‐word sequences compared to other ungrammatical sequences. However, their analyses only included trials where participants correctly rejected the transposed items.…”