The transposed-character effect is not modulated by contrast display in Chinese word recognition

Studies have shown that the transposed-letter effect is moderated by visual factors, but whether the transposed-character effect in the Chinese language is moderated by visual factors such as contrast display remains unknown. Accordingly, we conducted two experiments using a single-presentation lexical decision task with real words (????), transposed-character (????) and replacement-character (????) pseudowords that manipulated the visual features of the stimuli, with four characters in the same color or the first two characters and the last two characters in different colors (???? vs ????) in Experiment 1 and critical characters in plain or highlighted text (???? vs ????) in Experiment 2, to explore whether contrast display moderates the transposed-character effect. The results revealed that color segmentation and critical character highlighting did not significantly moderate the transposed-character effect. The stability of the transposed-character effect suggests that this effect may be influenced mainly by language factors. This is important for achieving a comprehensive understanding of the transposed-character effect and the core mechanism of the Chinese reading process.