Transposed-Word Effects in the Auditory Modality Also Occur With a Slow Speech Rate

In the present study, we investigated transposed-word (TW) effects in the grammatical decision task with auditory stimuli presented at a slow speech rate. We hypothesized that slowing the rate of presentation of speech stimuli should diminish TW effects under the assumption that the encoding of word-order information should be more precise in these conditions. Evidence that this might indeed be the case had already been seen in the visual modality with the serial presentation of word sequences yielding less pronounced TW effects. In these visual studies, the effects were mainly significant in error rates and not in response times (RTs) possibly because serial presentation enhances the precision of word-order encoding. Here, we observed significant TW effects in both RTs and error rates. The present results therefore demonstrate that a slower speech rate does not eliminate TW effects in RTs. These results contradict the hypothesis that a slower speech rate might enhance word-order encoding and further suggest that it is not the serial presentation of stimuli per se that is the only reason for why TW effects are typically not found in RTs in studies that have used serial presentation procedures in the visual modality.