You That Read Wrong Again! A Transposed-Word Effect in Grammaticality Judgments.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Sentence comprehension involves processing word order.
• Previous models assumed deterministic encoding of word sequences.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the precision of word order encoding during sentence comprehension.
• To identify novel effects in speeded grammaticality judgments.

Main Methods:

• A transposed-word effect was examined using speeded grammaticality judgments on five-word sequences.
• Test sequences were created by transposing adjacent words from grammatical and ungrammatical base sentences.
• Experiments were conducted in both laboratory (N=57) and online (N=94) settings.

Main Results:

• Participants found it harder to identify ungrammaticality when word order was transposed from a grammatically correct base sentence.
• This indicates that the initial encoding of word order is not absolute.
• The transposed-word effect was observed consistently across both experimental settings.

Conclusions:

• The study demonstrates a novel transposed-word effect, revealing uncertainty in word order encoding.
• This effect suggests parallel processing of words and top-down influences from sentence structure.
• Findings contribute to understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying written sentence comprehension.