The Transposed-Word Effect Persists Across Text Orientations in Chinese

<p dir="ltr">This is the data file for an experiment investigating transposed-word effects in Chinese reading, for sentences displayed in both familiar and unfamiliar reading directions.</p><p dir="ltr">The transposed-word effect, in which ungrammatical sequences created by swapping two words in a grammatical sentence are harder to reject than matched controls derived from ungrammatical base sentences, provides compelling evidence for flexibility in the positional encoding of words during reading.

In alphabetic scripts, this effect is weakened in unfamiliar formats such as serial word presentation or backward text, supporting the view that unusual text presentation promotes serial processing and reduces positional flexibility. We investigated whether similar effects arise in Chinese, a non-alphabetic script that historically has been read in multiple directions. Two hundred native Chinese speakers performed speeded grammaticality judgments for five-word stimuli.