The impact of relative word-length on effects of non-adjacent word transpositions

A recent study (Wen et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 50: 934–941, 2024) found no influence of relative word-length on transposed-word effects. However, following the tradition of prior research on effects of transposed words during sentence reading, the transposed words in that study were adjacent words (words at positions 2 and 3 or 3 and 4 in five-word sequences). We surmised that the absence of an influence of relative word-length might be due to word identification being too precise when the two words are located close to eye-fixation location, hence cancelling the impact of more approximate indices of word identity such as word length. We therefore hypothesized that relative word-length might impact on transposed-word effects when the transposition involves non-adjacent words. The present study put this hypothesis to test and found that relative word-length does modify the size of transposed-word effects with non-adjacent transpositions. Transposed-word effects are greater when the transposed words have the same length. Furthermore, a cross-study analysis confirmed that transposed-word effects are greater for adjacent than for non-adjacent transpositions.