Do Love You Me? Failure to Notice Word Transpositions is Induced by Parallel Word Processing

Recent research has shown that readers may to fail notice word transpositions during reading (e.g., the transposition of "fail" and "to" in this sentence). Although this transposed word (TW) phenomenon was initially taken as evidence that readers process multiple words in parallel, several studies now show that TW-effects may also occur when words are presented one-by-one. Critically however, in the majority of studies TW-effects are weaker in serial presentation. Here we argue that while word position coding may to some extent proceed post-lexically (allowing TW-effects to occur despite seeing words one-by-one), stronger TW-effects in parallel presentation nonetheless evidence a degree of parallel word processing. We additionally report an experiment wherein a sample of Dutch participants (N = 34) made grammaticality judgments about 4-word TW sentences (e.g., 'the was man here', 'the went dog away') and ungrammatical control sentences ('the man dog here', 'the was went away'), whereby the four words were presented either serially or in parallel. Ungrammaticality was decidedly more difficult to notice in the TW condition, but only when words were presented in parallel. No effects were observed in the serial presentation whatsoever. The present results bolster the notion that word order is encoded with a degree of flexibility, and further provide straightforward evidence for parallel word processing during reading.