An Eye-tracking Study of Transposed-letter Effect in English Word Recognition by Mandarin Speakers

With the method of eye-tracking technology, this study explored the process of English visual word recognition by Mandarin speakers. Two groups of Chinese-English bilinguals with low and intermediate English proficiency participated in a forward-masked English lexical decision experiment that involved high- and low-frequency words. Besides, this study also manipulated the letter case of the two types of primes: the transposed-letter primes and the substituted-letter primes, to detect the transposed-letter effect (TLE) in English word recognition. The results showed that the two factors—English proficiency and word frequency were directly impacting the existence of the TLE, and the letter cases were not the major effect on TLE. More interesting finding is that the eye-tracking data were closely correlated with the TLE: for higher word frequency and better English proficiency, the larger the TLE sizes, the longer the gazing times on the two middle letters. Therefore, these results might indicate that both low- and intermediate-level Chinese-English bilinguals were on the way to develop a coarse-grained processing route for rapidly accessing English words.