Word position coding in reading is noisy.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Human Sentence Processing

Background:

• Readers associate word representations with sentence locations.
• Word position coding may involve visual cues and reader expectations.
• Flexibility of word position coding is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate the flexibility of word position coding.
• Determine how readers perceive word order.
• Assess the influence of local flexibility and top-down expectations on word position coding.

Main Methods:

• Readers performed grammaticality judgments on four-word sentences.
• Incorrect sentences were created by transposing two words.
• Compared error rates and response times for inner- vs. outer-word transpositions.

Main Results:

• Longer response times and higher error rates for inner-transposed sentences compared to outer-transposed sentences.
• Evidence suggests local flexibility in word position coding.
• Increased confusion probability as the distance between plausible and actual word locations decreases.

Conclusions:

• Word position coding is influenced by local flexibility and top-down expectations.
• Readers exhibit moderate noise in word position coding.
• The perception of word order is not solely dictated by recognition order.