Spatiotopic locations are defined by low-level visual information provided by the spaces between words, and, as readers move their eyes along the line of text, word identities are gradually assigned to these locations. Adapted to the case of reading, the spatiotopic coordinates for written words are defined as representing a word’s location in a line of text that is being read, independently of the position of the reader’s gaze on that line of text. Spatiotopic coordinates provide a reference frame for representing the location of an object in a visual scene independently of where the viewer’s eyes are looking. In recent theoretical work on skilled reading the notion of a spatiotopic representation of word positions has taken a central role (Grainger, 2018 Snell, Meeter, & Grainger, 2017 Snell, van Leipsig, Grainger, & Meeter, 2018). These findings provide further support for the hypothesized noisy assignment of word identities to spatiotopic locations along a line of text during reading. Although there was some evidence for transposition effects with nonwords, the effects were much larger with word sequences. We compared the transposition effects for ungrammatical word sequences and nonword sequences observed with these different measures. We used standard response-time (RT) and error-rate analyses plus signal detection theory (SDT) measures of discriminability (d’) and bias ( c). Concurrent articulation was used to limit the contribution of active rehearsal. Here we used the change-detection task with a 1-s delay introduced between sequences – a task thought to tap into visual short-term memory.

In that research, participants found it harder to judge that two successive brief presentations of five-word sequences were different when the difference was caused by transposing two adjacent words compared with different word replacements – a transposition effect. The present study builds on our prior work showing evidence for noisy word-position coding in an immediate same-different matching task.

How to change encoding in word