Context but not reading speed modulates transposed-word effects in Chinese reading

Abstract

Recent research using a speeded grammaticality decision revealed novel transposed-word effects when reading alphabetic languages such as French (Mirault, Snell, & Grainger, 2018), and nonalphabetic languages such as Chinese (Liu, Li, Paterson, & Wang, 2020). Transposed-word effects are considered to reflect flexibility in word order processing, but the factors that might modulate such effects remain unknown. The present study investigated this issue by using a within-subjects design in Chinese reading. In experiment 1, the participants were asked to read sentences at their normal and speeded reading speed and to make grammaticality decisions as accurately as possible. No significant interaction between transposed-word effects and reading speed was found, suggesting that transposed-word effects are not modulated by reading speed and that they are similar regardless of whether the participants read slowly or quickly. In experiment 2, we manipulated the context before the transposed words and used a speeded grammaticality decision task. We observed significant interactive effects between transposed-word effects and context, and analyses revealed that transposed-word effects decreased when the first and second words were transposed in a sentence. We conclude that context rather than reading speed modulates transposed-word effects in Chinese reading and discuss these findings with regard to the noisy bottom-up allocation of word identities and top-down sentence-level constraints.