Readers can recognise multiple words at a glance but out of order: Evidence from transposed word effects in Japanese

Abstract

Readers find it difficult to reject ungrammatical sentences with two adjacent words transposed (e.g. I met my friend kind at the station), and they sometimes misclassify such sentences as grammatical—a phenomenon known as the transposed word effect. According to the parallel processing model, readers simultaneously process multiple words of a sentence, which creates uncertainty about the spatial position of words and leads them to perceive transposed sentences as if they were in the correct order. Recent studies, however, have challenged this interpretation and proposed that readers process words serially, and rational inference subsequently corrects transposition errors in the sentence representation. Using a rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP) paradigm that minimises overt left-to-right serial reading, this study provides new behavioural and pupillometric evidence that transposed word effects can arise from fast parallel processing of words, under conditions in which words are unlikely to have been identified one at a time. Our findings contribute to the ongoing debate regarding serial versus parallel processing in reading, by elucidating the temporal dynamics of the transposed word effect.