An Investigation on Transposed-word Effect Under No Speed Pressure

Readers’ processing model has long been discussed in the field of reading study. Recently, the novel finding of transposed-word effect provides a new perspective into this issue. Since previous research concerning this effect all employ speeded decision task which does not fit the normal reading process, the present study sets out to investigate transposed-word effect through grammaticality judgment task taken under no speed pressure to test its validity with normal reading. The experiment result shows that participants do respond slower and make more errors when encountering transposed-word sentences, which means transposed- word effect does exist even when there is no speed pressure. It is then further argued that this effect reflects the flexibility in the processing of word order and there is a combination of top-down processing of the overall sentence structure and a noisy bottom-up processing of each word’s identity during the readers’ sentence reading.