Abstract
Studies using a grammaticality decision task suggest surprising flexibility in the processing of the relative order of words in sentences when reading alphabetic scripts like French. In these studies, participants made rapid grammaticality decisions for ungrammatical stimuli created by transposing two adjacent words in either a grammatical or an ungrammatical base sentence, which were intermixed with equal numbers of grammatically correct stimuli. The key finding was that participants made more errors and were slower to reject transposed-word stimuli created from grammatical than ungrammatical base sentences. This suggested that flexibility in the processing of word order allowed participants to access representations of the base grammatical sentences, interfering with their decisions to correctly reject transposed-word stimuli. With the present research, we investigated if a similar transposed-word effect is observed for a non-alphabetic script (Chinese) that uses few grammatical markers and primarily conveys grammatical structure via word order. Such scripts may require stricter processing of word order during reading and so provide a strong test of the cross-linguistic generality of the transposed-word effect. We report three experiments using the same design and procedure as previous research, while varying the length of the transposed words across experiments. In all three experiments, participants made more errors and were slower to reject transposed-word stimuli derived from grammatical than ungrammatical base sentences. This replicates previous findings with alphabetic scripts and provides novel evidence for a transposed-word effect in Chinese reading. We consider the implications for models of reading in alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts.
Highlights
Recent research using a speeded grammaticality decision task has revealed a novel transposed-word effect whereby word order appears not to be processed strictly in sentence reading (Mirault et al, 2018; Snell & Grainger, 2019a; see Grainger, 2018)
A generalized linear mixed-effects (GLME) model was used to analyze accuracy and a linear mixed-effects (LME) model was used to analyze response times, with participants and stimuli as crossed random effects (Baayen et al, 2008), and the ungrammatical control condition used as the reference
The present research provides novel evidence for a transposed-word effect in Chinese reading. This effect was essentially the same as that reported previously for alphabetic languages (Mirault et al, 2018; see Snell & Grainger, 2019a). As in this previous research, we found that participants in a speeded grammaticality decision task made more errors and were slower to make correct responses for ungrammatical strings created by transposing two adjacent words in a grammatical rather than an ungrammatical base sentence
Summary
Recent research using a speeded grammaticality decision task has revealed a novel transposed-word effect whereby word order appears not to be processed strictly in sentence reading (Mirault et al, 2018; Snell & Grainger, 2019a; see Grainger, 2018). The reported experiments focused on ungrammatical word strings created by transposing two adjacent words in either a grammatical base sentence Such findings are resonant with other evidence showing flexibility in the encoding of letter position information in words (e.g., Andrews, 1996; Chambers, 1979). Participants often misread a transposed-letter pseudoword as a real word, interfering with its categorization as a nonword Such effects have been central to the development of current computational models of visual word recognition, which incorporate a degree of uncertainty (e.g., Gomez, Ratcliff, & Perea, 2008) or flexibility (e.g., Davis, 2010; Grainger & van Heuven, 2003; Whitney, 2001) in letter-position encoding. Grammatically correct sentences and the experimental and control transposed-word stimuli were presented as stimuli in each experiment
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