The transposed-word effect does not require parallel word processing: Failure to notice transpositions with serial presentation of words

Abstract

Readers sometimes fail to notice word transposition errors, reporting a sentence with two transposed words to be grammatical (the transposed-word effect). It has been suggested that this effect implicates parallel word processing during sentence reading. The current study directly assessed the role of parallel word processing in failure to notice word transposition errors, by comparing error detection under normal sentence presentation conditions and when words are presented serially at 250 ms/word. Extending recent results obtained with serial presentation of Chinese sentences (Liu, Li, Cutter, Paterson, & Wang, Cognition 218: 104922, 2022), in Experiment 1 we found a transposed-word effect with serial presentation of English sentences. In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding with task instructions that allowed responding at any time during the presentation of the sentence; this result indicates that the transposed-word effect that appears with serial word presentation is not due to a late process of reconstruction of short-term memory. Thus, parallel word processing is not necessary for a transposed-word effect in English. Like Liu et al. ( 2022), we did find that the transposed-word effect was statistically larger with parallel presentation than with serial presentation; we consider several explanations as to why this is so.

Transposed-word effects when reading serially

“…One could therefore argue that the fact that we did observe this pattern is evidence against a strictly serial, one word-at-time, account of reading. Nevertheless, noisy channel accounts of sentence processing (e.g., Gibson et al [ 6 ]) do predict that errors, including transposed-word errors, can go unnoticed even under strictly incremental processing, due to the approximate (or good-enough: Ferreira & Lowder [ 9 ]) nature of the sentence-level structures that are computed on the fly (see also Huang & Staub [ 13 ]; Milledge et al [ 14 ]). Moreover, as already proposed in related work from our group (e.g., Dufour et al [ 15 ]; Pegado & Grainger [ 29 ]; Wen et al [ 27 , 30 ]), top-down constraints imposed by sentence-level structures (syntactic and semantic) would contribute to transposed-word effects independently of presentation mode (the same holds for post-lexical integration accounts of transposed-word effects as proposed by Huang & Staub).…”

“…Since the criterion for an “ungrammatical” response is tied to the value set for a “grammatical” response (cf., the Leaky Competing Accumulator and Drift Diffusion models of lexical decision: Dufau et al [ 32 ]; Ratcliff et al [ 33 ]; see also Perea et al [ 34 ]) this encourages fast ungrammatical responses that are associated with an increase in errors across the complete range of RTs, and particularly for transposed-word sequences (see Fig 9 ). We suspect that the overall greater size of transposed-word effects (in both errors and RTs) seen with parallel presentation compared with serial presentation is due to a combination of an increase in bottom-up positional noise under parallel presentation (see also Huang & Staub [ 13 ]), plus the different ways that participants perform the grammatical decision task with these two procedures.…”

“…In Experiment 3 we provide a direct comparison of transposed-word effects obtained with parallel presentation of words and with the RSVP presentation conditions tested in Experiment 2. Prior work investigating transposed-word effects under serial and parallel presentation conditions (Liu et al [ 17 ]) used RSVP with 250 ms per word and compared that to parallel presentation of words until participants’ response (see also Huang & Staub [ 13 ], and Milledge et al [ 14 ]). Crucially, compared to these studies, Experiment 3 enabled a comparison of transposed-word effects under parallel and serial presentation conditions matched for the total presentation duration of word sequences.…”

“…Such good-enough or incomplete representations of the input would promote sentence interpretability in the face of ungrammaticality caused, for example, by changes in word order. Thus, noisy incremental models of language comprehension can account for transposed-word effects, and therefore such effects are not necessarily a signature of parallel word processing (Huang & Staub [ 11 – 13 ]; Milledge et al [ 14 ]). Support for this general approach was provided by Dufour et al [ 15 ] who found robust transposed-word effects with an auditory grammatical decision version of the Mirault et al [ 1 ] study.…”

“…Following Liu et al [ 17 ], in Experiments 1 and 2 we imposed serial reading by using the RSVP procedure with words presented briefly one after the other on the center of the screen. In Experiment 1 participants could only respond at the end of the RSVP stream, while in Experiment 2 they could respond at any time (i.e., before the end of the sequence if possible—see also Huang & Staub [ 13 ]). The latter procedure allowed us to have RTs in the transposed-word condition roughly in line with those obtained in the Mirault et al study.…”