Phrase frequency does not modulate transposed-word effects in the visual and auditory modalities.

Abstract

We provide a further examination of the influence of top-down sentence-level constraints on the transposed-word effect by manipulating a factor-phrase frequency-that directly implicates sentence-level representations. The focus was on ungrammatical transposed-word sequences, and under the assumption that top-down influences would play a role in driving transposed-word effects, we predicted that ungrammatical decisions would be harder (longer reaction times and higher error rates) when the ungrammatical transposed-word sequences were derived from high-frequency compared with low-frequency phrases. Five experiments were conducted in which participants performed a speeded grammatical decision task. The results are clear-cut. Although phrase frequency did influence grammatical decisions to grammatically correct phrases, with shorter reaction times and lower error rates for high-frequency phrases relative to low-frequency phrases (Experiment 4), ungrammatical decisions were not influenced by the frequency of the base sentences from which the transposed-word sequences were formed, neither in the auditory (Experiments 1 and 2) nor in the visual modality (Experiment 3). In Experiment 5, we show that a transposed-word effect is observed when comparing the transposed-word sequences of Experiment 3 with nontransposed control sequences. We conclude that frequency-sensitive sentence-level constraints, as measured as the frequency of occurrence of a sequence of words in corpora of spoken and written language, do not modulate transposed-word effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).