Word position coding in reading is noisy

In the present article, we investigate a largely unstudied cognitive process: word position coding. The question of how readers perceive word order is not trivial: Recent research has suggested that readers associate activated word representations with plausible locations in a sentence-level representation. Rather than simply being dictated by the order in which words are recognized, word position coding may be influenced by bottom-up visual cues (e.g., word length information), as well as by top-down expectations. Here we assessed how flexible word position coding is. We let readers make grammaticality judgments about four-word sentences. The incorrect sentences were constructed by transposing two words in a correct sentence (e.g., “the man can run” became “the can man run”). The critical comparison was between two types of incorrect sentence: one with a transposition of the inner two words, and one with a transposition of the outer two words (“run man can the”). We reasoned that under limited (local) flexibility, it should be easier to classify the outer-transposed sentences as incorrect, because the words were farther away from their plausible locations in this condition. If words were recognized irrespective of location, on the other hand, there should be no difference between these two conditions. As it turned out, we observed longer response times and higher error rates for inner- than for outer-transposed sentences, indicating that local flexibility and top-down expectations can jointly lead the reader to confuse the locations of words, with a probability that increases as the distance between the plausible and actual locations of a word decreases. We conclude that word position coding is subject to a moderate amount of noise.