A transposed-word effect across space and time: Evidence from Chinese

A compelling account of the reading process holds that words must be encoded serially, and so recognized strictly one at a time in the order they are encountered. However, this view has been challenged recently, based on evidence showing that readers sometimes fail to notice when adjacent words appear in ungrammatical order. This is argued to show that words are actually encoded in parallel, so that multiple words are processed simultaneously and therefore might be recognized out of order. We tested this account in an experiment in Chinese with 112 skilled readers, employing methods used previously to demonstrate flexible word order processing, and display techniques that allowed or disallowed the parallel encoding of words. The results provided evidence for flexible word order processing even when words must be encoded serially. Accordingly, while word order can be processed flexibly during reading, this need not entail that words are encoded in parallel.