Word length does not modulate the transposed-word effect in Chinese reading: Testing the OB1-Reader

Grammaticality decision studies show that word order is processed flexibly during reading, as participants often misread sentences containing transposed words as if they were correctly ordered (e.g., Mirault et al., Psychological Science, 29 (12), 1922-1929. 2018). The OB1-Reader model (Snell et al., Psychological Review, 125 (6), 969-984, 2018) explains this effect as arising from positional uncertainty during parallel word recognition, proposing that low-level visual cues like word length help constrain word positions, so that transpositions are easier to detect when words differ in length. In Chinese, the absence of this effect has been attributed to limited variability in word length and lack of explicit word boundaries. We therefore investigated whether marking word boundaries using interword spaces (Experiment 1) or alternating text-color (Experiment 2) would elicit a word-length effect on transposed-word detection in Chinese. Both experiments produced robust transposed-word effects, some indication that explicit boundary cues improve transposed-word detection, but with no evidence that they elicit a word-length effect on transposed-word detection. Together with converging evidence from French, these findings suggest both that boundary cues do not reliably reduce positional uncertainty in Chinese, and that low-level visual cues like word length have limited influence on positional processing in either alphabetic scripts or Chinese.