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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • The transposed-word (TW) phenomenon, where word order errors are overlooked, is a recently identified linguistic error.
  • The cognitive mechanisms underlying word position coding are currently under investigation.
  • Understanding how attention and memory contribute to processing sentence structure is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the roles of attention and memory in the transposed-word phenomenon.
  • To determine if focused attention influences the detection of transposed-word errors.
  • To explore whether word position coding occurs in memory.

Main Methods:

  • Participants (N=54) performed grammaticality judgments on correct, transposed-word, and ungrammatical sentences.
  • Stimuli were presented for 200 ms, followed by a post-mask and a 50 ms retro-cue.
  • Cues were presented at critical or non-critical locations to assess attention's role and cue validity effects.

Main Results:

  • Transposed-word sentences were harder to reject than control sentences, confirming the TW effect.
  • The TW effect was modulated by cue validity, with valid cues reducing the effect.
  • Valid retro-cues, presented after stimulus offset, attenuated the transposed-word effect.

Conclusions:

  • Focused attention plays a role in binding words to their correct locations within a sentence.
  • The results suggest that word position coding, and thus the processing of the TW phenomenon, may occur in memory.
  • This research provides insights into the cognitive processes involved in real-time language comprehension and error detection.