Word position coding in reading is noisy

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
Joshua Snell, Jonathan Grainger

Abstract

In the present article, we investigate a largely unstudied cognitive process: word position coding. The question of how readers perceive word order is not trivial: Recent research has suggested that readers associate activated word representations with plausible locations in a sentence-level representation. Rather than simply being dictated by the order in which words are recognized, word position coding may be influenced by bottom-up visual cues (e.g., word length information), as well as by top-down expectations. Here we assessed how flexible word position coding is. We let readers make grammaticality judgments about four-word sentences. The incorrect sentences were constructed by transposing two words in a correct sentence (e.g., "the man can run" became "the can man run"). The critical comparison was between two types of incorrect sentence: one with a transposition of the inner two words, and one with a transposition of the outer two words ("run man can the"). We reasoned that under limited (local) flexibility, it should be easier to classify the outer-transposed sentences as incorrect, because the words were farther away from their plausible locations in this condition. If words were recognized irrespective of location, on...Continue Reading

References

Aug 30, 2008·Psychological Review·Pablo GomezManuel Perea
Feb 19, 2009·Trends in Cognitive Sciences·Erik D ReichleKeith Rayner
Dec 8, 2009·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Roger LevyKeith Rayner
Nov 16, 2011·Behavior Research Methods·Sebastiaan MathôtJan Theeuwes
Jan 27, 2016·Trends in Cognitive Sciences·Jonathan GraingerJohannes C Ziegler
Mar 10, 2017·PloS One·Joshua SnellJonathan Grainger
Jul 18, 2017·Cognition·Joshua Snell, Jonathan Grainger
Aug 7, 2018·Psychological Review·Joshua SnellMartijn Meeter
Oct 26, 2018·Psychological Science·Jonathan MiraultJonathan Grainger

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Citations

Sep 8, 2020·Attention, Perception & Psychophysics·Zhiwei LiuJingxin Wang
Oct 11, 2020·Psychonomic Bulletin & Review·Felipe Pegado, Jonathan Grainger
Feb 2, 2021·Neuropsychologia·Felipe PegadoJonathan Grainger
Dec 24, 2021·Attention, Perception & Psychophysics·Jonathan MiraultJonathan Grainger

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