In psychology, the transposed letter effect is a phenomenon in which letters within a word are switched. The phenomenon takes place when two letters in a word (typically called a base word) switch positions to create a new string of letters that form a new, non-word (typically called a transposed letter non-word or TL non-word). It is a form of priming because the transposed letter non-word is able to activate the lexical representation of its base word. A non-word that is created by transposing letters in a base word is significantly more effective at being a prime for that base word than would be a prime created by exchanging letters from the base word with random letters that were not originally in the base word. For example, the TL non-word stduent would be a more effective prime than would be the non-word stobent for the base word student. Priming is an effect of implicit memory where exposure to a certain stimulus, event, or experience affects responding to a different stimulus. Typically, the event causes the stimulus to become more salient. The transposed letter effect can be used as a form of priming.
Relevance With any priming task the purpose is to test the initial stages of processing in order to better understand more complex processing. Psychologists use transposed-letter priming to test how people comprehend word meanings. From these findings, people can begin to understand how people learn, develop and understand language. Transposed-letter priming is used in a wide array of experiments and the reasons for using this method can depend on the particular hypothesis.
Types
Close transpositions Switching the position of adjacent letters in the base word is a close transposition. This type of transposition creates the greatest priming effect. For example, an effective prime for the word computer would be the TL non-word comptuer.
Distant transpositions Forming a prime word by switching the position of nonadjacent letters in the base word is a distant transposition. There is significantly less priming effect in a distant transposition than a close transposition, no matter how distant the two letters are from each other. An example for computer would be the non-word ctompuer.
Transposed word effect Switching the position of adjacent words in a base sentence (rather than word) is a transposed word effect. This transposition creates a great effect. For example, the white cat ran slowly becomes the cat white ran slowly. Participants are shown to take longer and were more error prone to reject the transposed word sentence than control sentence (e.g. the white cat ran helpfully). This type has been used to provide arguments in favour of parallel serial processing.
History The first to test the transposed-letter effects were Bruner and O'Dowd (1958) in a paper entitled, "A Note on the Informativeness of Parts of Words". However, their experiment did not use priming. They showed participants a word that had two letters switched either at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the word. The researchers measured the response time for the participants to indicate what the word was. Bruner and O'Dowd found that having an error at the beginning of a word created the slowest response time, the end was the next slowest, and the middle was the fastest. They inferred that the beginning and the end were more important for word recognition than the middle. From there, the transposed letter effect was used to test how people process and recognize words using many tasks.
In baboons A study by Ziegler et al. (2013) demonstrated that baboons also show similar effects in regards to the transposed letter effect as humans. The purpose of the study was to find evidence to suggest that baboons use orthographic processing when reading. Previous research has considered transposed letter effects as strong evidence for orthographic processing (Grainger, 2008). Baboons were asked to classify strings of letters as either words or non-words by selecting certain shapes (for example, a circle for a word and a square for a non-word). The baboons were shown words they had previously learned and non-words. The non-words were created by using four-letter words, previously learned by the baboons, and either transposing the two middle letters or replacing the two middle letters with different letters (double substitute non-words). Baboons classified TL non-words as words significantly more often than double substitute non-words.
Theories affected
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