0000000001020738
AUTHOR
Theeraporn Ratitamkul
On the flexibility of letter position coding during lexical processing: Evidence from eye movements when reading Thai
Previous research supports the view that initial letter position has a privileged role in comparison to internal letters for visual-word recognition in Roman script. The current study examines whether this is the case for Thai. Thai is an alphabetic script in which ordering of the letters does not necessarily correspond to the ordering of a word's phonemes. Furthermore, Thai does not normally have interword spaces. We examined whether the position of transposed letters (internal, e.g., porblem, vs. initial, e.g., rpoblem) within a word influences how readily those words are processed when interword spacing and demarcation of word boundaries (using alternatingbold text) is manipulated. The …
On the flexibility of letter position coding during lexical processing: the case of Thai.
In Indo-European languages, letter position coding is particularly noisy in middle positions (e.g., judge and jugde look very similar), but not in the initial letter position (e.g., judge vs. ujdge). Here we focus on a language (Thai) which, potentially, may be more flexible with respect to letter position coding than Indo-European languages: (i) Thai is an alphabetic language which is written without spaces between words (i.e., there is a degree of ambiguity in relation to which word a given letter belongs to) and (ii) some of the vowels are misaligned (e.g., [Formula: see text]/ε:bn/ is pronounced as /bε:n/), whereas others are not (e.g., [Formula: see text]/a:p/ is pronounced as /a:p/).…