N250 effects for letter transpositions depend on lexicality: ‘casual’ or ‘causal’?

We examined the electrophysiological correlates of one of the most influential orthographic effects: the transposed-letter-masked priming effect. Transposed-letter nonword–word pairs (‘jugde–judge’), as well as transposed-letter word–word pairs (‘casual–causal’) were included to investigate the influence of prime's lexicality in the transposed-letter effect. The results showed that when compared with the substituted-letter control conditions (‘jugde–judge’ vs. ‘jupte–judge’), transposed-letter primes produced a lower negativity in the N250 component. In contrast, no differences were obtained between the two word–word priming conditions (‘casual–causal’ vs. ‘carnal–causal’). The influence of lexicality in the transposed-letter effect is discussed according to the models of visual word recognition and previous evidence from event-related potentials.

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