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Evidence has supported the idea that readers lexically process words serially (one at a time), but evidence by Mirault et al. (2018) has demonstrated a transposed word effect. This effect is where readers have difficulty deciding that sentences such as “do love you me? “are ungrammatical, in which the transposition of two adjacent words (i.e., love you) would form a grammatical sentence, compared to sentences in which the transposition of two words does not result in grammaticality (e.g. the cat white was slowly). This has been taken as evidence for the parallel lexical processing of multiple words simultaneously. Evidence has also shown that the transposed word effect can be attributed to a combination of noisy bottom-up word position coding and top-down syntactic constraints. This effect can be interpreted within serial, as opposed to parallel, reading models. The present study will examine the transposed word effect by varying modality input and type of processing for which each of the two transposed words will be presented. However, we aim to replicate the previous findings in students and assess this with different input modalities (auditory and crossmodal) and different processing strategies (visual transposed word parallel, crossmodal transposed word serial and crossmodal transposed word parallel). In this experiment, we manipulate sequence type and experiment. Thus, we expected that the transposed word effect in the crossmodal transposed word parallel processing should be replicated (such that transposed words are responded to more slowly and are more error prone than control words). The main focus is on accuracy. Huang and Staub (2021) argued that the integration of word n+1 may begin before the integration of word n is complete, which may allow the transposed word effect to occur. As a result, the findings we observed may be more likely to ensue, as there is a higher likelihood that word n would be completed when the integration of word n+1 began when all words were presented and heard, the transposed word effect should be smaller or not present in crossmodal serial relative to visual transposed word serial and parallel processing and auditory transposed word tasks.

Evidence has supported the idea that readers lexically process words serially (one at a time), but evidence by Mirault et al. (2018) has demonstrated a transposed word effect. This effect is where readers have difficulty deciding that sentences such as “do love you me? “are ungrammatical, in which the transposition of two adjacent words (i.e., love you) would form a grammatical sentence, compared to sentences in which the transposition of two words does not result in grammaticality (e.g. the cat white was slowly). This has been taken as evidence for the parallel lexical processing of multiple words simultaneously. Evidence has also shown that the transposed word effect can be attributed to a combination of noisy bottom-up word position coding and top-down syntactic constraints. This effect can be interpreted within serial, as opposed to parallel, reading models. The present study will examine the transposed word effect by varying type of processing for which each of the two transposed words will be presented. We aim to replicate the previous findings by presenting words presented one word following the previous word in a sentence, as opposed to on word being presented at a time. In this experiment, we manipulate sequence type. Thus, we expected that the transposed word effect in visual parallel paradigm to be replicated such that transposed words are responded to more slowly and are more error prone than control words. However, the main focus is on accuracy. In addition, we aim to compare the results of visual transposed word parallel processing with that of visual transposed word serial processing. This is to assess whether the transposed word effect occurs as a result of the integration of word n+1 may begin before the integration of word n is complete, which may allow the transposed word effect to occur (Huang & Staub, 2021) . As a result, the findings we observed may be more likely to ensue, as there is a higher likelihood that word n would not complete when the integration of word n+1 began when all words are presented in a parallel, as opposed to serial manner. If this is the case, then the transposed word effect should be numerically larger in parallel than serial.