Using virtual reality to study reading: An eye-tracking investigation of transposed-word effects

Abstract Eye movements were recorded using a virtual reality (VR) set-up as participants made grammatical decisions to sequences of words. Ungrammatical decisions were harder to make to transposed-word sequences (The white was cat big) compared with control sequences where transposing two adjacent words never produces a correct sentence (The black ran dog fat). Crucially, we found significant transposed-word effects independently of the order in which the two critical words were fixated (i.e., was before cat vs. cat before was), thus falsifying a reading out-of-order account of transposed-word effects.