A transposed-word effect in Chinese reading
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SHORT REPORT
A transposed-word effect in Chinese reading Zhiwei Liu 1,2
&
Yan Li 1,2 & Kevin B. Paterson 3 & Jingxin Wang 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Studies using a grammaticality decision task suggest surprising flexibility in the processing of the relative order of words in sentences when reading alphabetic scripts like French. In these studies, participants made rapid grammaticality decisions for ungrammatical stimuli created by transposing two adjacent words in either a grammatical or an ungrammatical base sentence, which were intermixed with equal numbers of grammatically correct stimuli. The key finding was that participants made more errors and were slower to reject transposed-word stimuli created from grammatical than ungrammatical base sentences. This suggested that flexibility in the processing of word order allowed participants to access representations of the base grammatical sentences, interfering with their decisions to correctly reject transposed-word stimuli. With the present research, we investigated if a similar transposed-word effect is observed for a non-alphabetic script (Chinese) that uses few grammatical markers and primarily conveys grammatical structure via word order. Such scripts may require stricter processing of word order during reading and so provide a strong test of the cross-linguistic generality of the transposed-word effect. We report three experiments using the same design and procedure as previous research, while varying the length of the transposed words across experiments. In all three experiments, participants made more errors and were slower to reject transposed-word stimuli derived from grammatical than ungrammatical base sentences. This replicates previous findings with alphabetic scripts and provides novel evidence for a transposed-word effect in Chinese reading. We consider the implications for models of reading in alphabetic and nonalphabetic scripts. Keywords Transposed-word effect . Grammaticality decision task . Chinese reading
Introduction Recent research using a speeded grammaticality decision task has revealed a novel transposed-word effect whereby word order appears not to be processed strictly in sentence reading (Mirault et al., 2018; Snell & Grainger, 2019a; see also Grainger, 2018). The reported experiments focused on ungrammatical word strings created by transposing two adjacent words in either a grammatical base sentence (e.g., “The white * Kevin B. Paterson [email protected] * Jingxin Wang [email protected] 1
Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, Hexi District, Tianjin 330374, China
2
School of Education and Psychology, Sichuan University of Science and Engineering, Zigong, Sichuan, China
3
Department of Neuroscience, Psychology and Behaviour, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 9HN, UK
cat was big” became “The white was cat big”, with solid and wavy underlines highlighting the transposed words) or an ungrammatical base sentence (e.g., “The white cat was slowly” b
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