2026-10-06T05:03:24Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/30621008 2026-10-05T09:33:26Z category_37043 portal_403 item_type_3 month_year_10_2026

The Transposed-Word Effect Persists Across Text Orientations in Chinese Kevin Paterson (6297647) Yuru Cheng (19816934) Kuo Zhang (337825) Tongwen Hu (22621209) jingxin wang (19771824) Psychology eye movements Chinese transposed-word effects <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. Experimental stimuli were derived from grammatical base sentences, control stimuli from ungrammatical bases, and both were presented alongside similarly constructed grammatical sentences. These stimuli were shown in four orientations: conventional left-to-right, familiar top-to-bottom, and unfamiliar right-to-left and bottom-to-top. Robust transposed-word effects were observed in both accuracy and RTs across all orientations. However, the transposed-word effect was larger in the conventional left-to-right format than in the less familiar orientations. These findings indicate that positional flexibility is a general property of word processing across scripts, but that its magnitude is modulated by reading experience with different text formats.</p> 2026-10-05T09:33:26Z Dataset Dataset 10.25392/leicester.data.30621008.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/The_Transposed-Word_Effect_Persists_Across_Text_Orientations_in_Chinese/30621008 CC BY 4.0