ABSTRACT

Skilled readers may misinterpret “you that read wrong” for “you read that wrong”: a transposed-word effect. This relatively novel finding, which supports parallel word processing during sentence reading, is attributed to a combination of noisy bottom-up word position coding and top-down syntactic constraints. The present study focussed on the contribution of syntactic constraints in driving transposed-word effects. In a speeded grammatical decision experiment, two types of ungrammatical transposed-word sequences were compared, namely a transposition either across a syntactic phrase (“the have girls gone home”) or within a syntactic phrase (“the girls gone have home”). We found longer response times and lower accuracy rates for within-phrase transpositions than across-phrase transpositions, demonstrating a direct influence of syntactic structures on the transposed-word effect. We conclude that the assignment of words to positions in a sentence is guided by top-down syntactic constraints.

摘要

熟练的读者可能将“您读错了”误解为“您读错了”：转位词效果。这种比较新颖的发现支持句子阅读期间的并行单词处理，这归因于嘈杂的自下而上的单词位置编码和自上而下的句法约束。本研究集中在句法约束在驱动转置词效果中的作用。在加速的语法决策实验中，比较了两种类型的非语法转置词序列，即跨句法短语（“有女孩回家”）或句法短语（“女孩有回家”）中的换位”）。与跨短语转置相比，我们发现短语内转置的响应时间更长，准确率更低，这说明了句法结构对转位词效果的直接影响。我们得出的结论是，单词在句子中的位置分配受制于自上而下的语法约束。