Transposed-word effects when reading serially

Abstract

When asked to decide if an ungrammatical sequence of words is grammatically correct or not readers find it more difficult to do so (longer response times (RTs) and more errors) if the ungrammatical sequence is created by transposing two words from a correct sentence (e.g., the white was cat big) compared with a set of matched ungrammatical sequences for which transposing any two words could not produce a correct sentence (e.g., the white was cat slowly). Here, we provide a further exploration of transposed-word effects while imposing serial reading by using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) in Experiments 1 (respond at the end of the sequence) and 2 (respond as soon as possible—which could be during the sequence). Crucially, in Experiment 3 we compared performance under serial RSVP conditions with parallel presentation of the same stimuli for the same total duration and with the same group of participants. We found robust transposed-word effects in the RSVP conditions tested in all experiments, but only in error rates and not in RTs. This contrasts with the effects found in both errors and RTs in our prior work using parallel presentation, as well as the parallel presentation conditions tested in Experiment 3. We provide a tentative account of why, under conditions that impose a serial word-by-word reading strategy, transposed-word effects are only seen in error rates and not in RTs.

Transposed-word effects in speeded grammatical decisions to sequences of spoken words

“…However, this is apparently not the case. Two written language studies have reported that under serial presentation conditions transposed-word effects are observed in error rates but not in RTs 27 , 28 . So, it remains to be explained why the full pattern of transposed-word effects in both RTs and accuracy is seen with spoken words (the present study), but not with sequentially presented written words.…”

“…Alternatively, Mirault et al 27 tentatively suggested that the different patterns of transposed-word effects seen under parallel and serial word presentation might be due to the relative involvement of bottom-up and top-down processes. Parallel word presentation would be subject to both noisy bottom-up processing, with the noisy association of word identities to specific locations along a line of text 26 , 34 , as well as top-down sentence-level constraints imposing a syntactically correct word order 22 , 23 .…”

“…The comparison of transposed-word effects across studies provides an important clue as to why the odd-man out is the serial RSVP experiment (Mirault et al, 27 , Experiment 5). Although not shown in Fig.…”

“…Contrary to the parallel processing account of transposed-word effects (see 26 for a summary), recent work from our group 27 and work in Chinese 28 has shown that transposed-word effects can be observed with written materials even when the words are presented sequentially (one after the other at the same central location) using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP: 250 ms per word in the Liu et al 28 study, and 300 ms per word in the Mirault et al 27 study). However, the pattern that has systematically emerged from this research is that contrary to effects obtained with parallel word presentation, transposed-word effects obtained under serial presentation only emerge in error rates and not in RTs.…”

“…However, the pattern that has systematically emerged from this research is that contrary to effects obtained with parallel word presentation, transposed-word effects obtained under serial presentation only emerge in error rates and not in RTs. Given that serial word presentation greatly reduces word position uncertainty in bottom-up processing, Mirault et al 27 interpreted this pattern as reflecting the impact of top-down syntactic constraints on word-order encoding in the absence (or reduction) of bottom-up positional noise.…”