The impact of case changes on transposed-word effects

The present study provides a test of the influence of bottom-up visual cues on transposed-word effects. In a speeded grammatical decision task, two adjacent transposed words in an ungrammatical sequence of words were presented either in the same case (e.g., the white was cat big) or in different cases (e.g., the white WAS cat big). By comparing transposed-word sequences with the corresponding ungrammatical control sequences (e.g., the white was/WAS cat slowly), a significantly smaller transposed-word effect was found in the different-case condition. We take this result as further evidence for the role played by bottom-up positional noise in driving transposed-word effects. Changing case across the transposed-words provides additional bottom-up cues for word-order, hence diminishing transposed-word effects.