Are transposition effects specific to letters?

Abstract

Recent research has consistently shown that pseudowords created by transposing two letters are perceptually similar to their corresponding base words (e.g., jugde–judge). In the framework of the overlap model (Gomez, Ratcliff, & Perea, 2008), this effect is due to a noisy process in the localization of the “objects” (e.g., letters, kana syllables). In the present study, we examine whether this effect is specific to letter strings or whether it also occurs with other “objects” (namely, digits, symbols, and pseudoletters). To that end, we conducted a series of five masked priming experiments using the same–different task. Results showed robust effects of transposition for all objects, except for pseudoletters. This is consistent with the view that locations of familiar objects (i.e., letters, numbers, and symbols) can be best understood as distributions along a dimension rather than as precise points.

Keywords:

• Letter position coding
• Transposition
• Masked priming
• Same–different task

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grants from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation PSI2008–06107/PSIC and PSI2008–04069/PSIC. We thank Alejandro Estudillo and Valle Lara for their support in collecting data.

Notes

¹ An anonymous reviewer suggested that the transposition priming effect with pseudoletters might emerge if the probe is presented for a longer period of time. That is, a one-sec presentation of the probe might be ample time to encode familiar stimuli, but insufficient to encode pseudoletters. However, the issue at stake in the present experiments is the processing of the masked prime: Even with a longer duration of the probe, the processing of the “object position” in a masked prime composed of pseudoletters would be slow—when compared to primes composed of letters/digits/symbols.