Are Transposed‐Phoneme Effects Observed When Listening to Sentences?

Abstract In the present study, we asked a simple question: Can transposed‐phoneme effects, previously found with nonwords presented in isolation, be observed when the transposed‐phoneme nonwords are embedded in a sequence of spoken words that, apart from the transposed‐phoneme nonwords, formed a correct sentence? The results are clear‐cut. We found no evidence for a transposed‐phoneme effect during spoken sentence processing either in a nonword detection task (Experiments 1−3) or in a correct/incorrect decision task (Experiment 4), where “correctness” could either concern individual words (i.e., the presence of a nonword in the sequence) or the entire sequence (i.e., a grammatical decision). Hence, the presence of nonwords in spoken sentences was not harder to detect whether they were created by transposing (e.g., /ʃo l o k a/) or substituting (e.g., /ʃo r o p a/) two consonants in the corresponding base‐words (e.g., /ʃo k o l a/ chocolat “chocolate”). In contrast, a robust transposed‐letter effect was observed during sentence reading (Experiment 5), using the same word/nonword sequences and the same correct/incorrect decision task as in Experiment 4. We discuss the possibility that the greater seriality imposed by spoken sentences in the processing of spoken words leads to a more precise encoding of phoneme order, thus cancelling the transposed‐phoneme effect. Sentence reading, on the other hand, would involve more parallel processing, hence the robust transposed‐letter effect found with written sentences.