The impact of atypical text presentation on transposed-word effects

When asked to decide if an ungrammatical sequence of words is grammatically correct or not, readers find it more difficult to do so (longer response times (RTs) and more errors) if the ungrammatical sequence is created by transposing two words from a correct sentence (e.g., the white was cat big) compared with matched ungrammatical sequences where transposing two words does not produce a correct sentence (e.g., the white was cat slowly). Here, we provide a further exploration of transposed-word effects when reading unspaced text in Experiment 1, and when reading from right-to-left ("backwards" reading) in Experiment 2. We found significant transposed-word effects in error rates but not in RTs, a pattern previously found in studies using a one-word-at-a-time sequential presentation. We conclude that the absence of transposed-word effects in RTs in the present study and prior work is due to that atypical nature of the way that text was presented. Under the hypothesis that transposed-word effects at least partly reflect a certain amount of parallel word processing during reading, we further suggest that the ability to process words in parallel would require years of exposure to text in its regular format.