Do orthotactics and phonology constrain the transposed-letter effect?

Transposing two internal letters of a word produces a perceptually similar item (as in cholocate). To determine the precise nature of the encoding of letter position within a word, it is important to examine the role of orthography and phonology in the transposed-letter effect. Experiment 1 examined whether transposed-letter effects are affected by the legality of the letter transposition in a masked priming paradigm (e.g., comsos-COSMOS vs. vebral-VERBAL; 'ms' is an illegal bigram in Spanish). Results showed a greater transposed-letter priming effect when the transposed bigram was illegal than when it was legal. In Experiment 2, we examine the role of phonology by exploiting the context-dependent pronunciation of the consonant letter 'c' in a masked priming paradigm with the lexical decision task. Results showed that the magnitude of the transposed-letter effect was approximately the same for pairs like cholocate-CHOCOLATE vs. chodonate-CHOCOLATE and for pairs like racidal-RADICAL vs. ramibal-RADICAL. We examine the implication of these findings for models of letter position coding.