A cross-task comparison of transposed letter effects with consonants and vowels using visible targets

A now well-documented finding is that nonwords created by transposing two internal letters (e.g., vetrical, vercital) are perceived as being more similar to their base word (i.e., vertical) than nonwords created by substituting other letters for the transposed letters (e.g., vefsical, versifal). Most of the relevant research on transposed letter (TL) effects has involved a masked priming procedure with a lexical decision task. The results have typically been explained in terms of the interactions between the orthographic coding process and the lexical access process. The present research was an investigation of TL effects when the TL nonword is a target in both lexical decision tasks and same-different matching tasks in an attempt to determine whether the effect patterns could be explained in a way that is reasonably similar to how current orthographic coding models explain TL effects in masked priming experiments. Essentially parallel results of large TL effects for consonant-consonant transpositions and smaller, but highly significant, TL effects for vowel-vowel transpositions were observed in the two tasks for both adjacent and nonadjacent transpositions. The implications of our data pattern, particularly the large consonant-vowel effect size difference, for accounts of the relevant processes are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).