EXPRESS: Keep Clam and Carry On: Misperceptions of Transposed-Letter Neighbors.

Previous research has provided evidence that readers experience processing difficulty when reading words that have a transposed letter (TL) neighbor (e.g., TRAIL has the TL neighbor TRIAL). Here, we provide direct evidence that this interference is driven by explicit misidentifications of the word for its TL neighbor. Experiment 1 utilized an eye-tracking task in which participants read sentences aloud and reading errors were coded. Sentences had a target word that either (1) had a TL neighbor or (2) was a matched control word with no TL neighbor. In Experiment 2, participants identified words within sentences that they consciously misread and reported the interloper. In both experiments, readers explicitly misidentified many more of the transposed-letter words than control words, and most often for their TL neighbor. These findings support the idea that TL interference effects are due primarily to initial misperceptions and post-lexical checking rather than co-activation at the lexical level.