Transposed Letter Effect

In psychology, the transposed letter effect is a phenomenon in which two letters within a word switch positions to form a new, non-word string, commonly called a transposed letter non-word, that still activates the mental representation of the original base word. It is a form of priming: a transposed letter non-word primes recognition of its base word far more effectively than a non-word created by swapping in letters that were never part of the original word at all, so that a garbled string such as stduent primes recognition of student more effectively than an unrelated garbled string such as stobent does. Priming itself is an effect of implicit memory in which exposure to one stimulus affects a person's response to a later, different stimulus, typically by making that later stimulus more salient, and the transposed letter effect is one documented way this kind of priming occurs.