Child readers’ eye movements in reading Thai

Abstract

It has recently been found that adult native readers of Thai, an alphabetic scriptio continua language, engage similar oculomotor patterns as readers of languages written with spaces between words; despite the lack of inter-word spaces, first and last characters of a word appear to guide optimal placement of Thai readers' eye movements, just to the left of word-centre. The issue addressed by the research described here is whether eye movements of Thai children also show these oculomotor patterns. Here the effect of first and last character frequency and word frequency on the eye movements of 18 Thai children when silently reading normal unspaced and spaced text was investigated. Linear mixed-effects model analyses of viewing time measures (first fixation duration, single fixation duration, and gaze duration) and of landing site location revealed that Thai children's eye movement patterns were similar to their adult counterparts. Both first character frequency and word frequency played important roles in Thai children's landing sites; children tended to land their eyes further into words, close to the word centre, if the word began with higher frequency first characters, and this effect was facilitated in higher frequency words. Spacing also facilitated more effective use of first character frequency and it also assisted in decreasing children's viewing time. The use of last-character frequency appeared to be a later development, affecting mainly single fixation duration and gaze duration. In general, Thai children use the same oculomotor control mechanisms in reading spaced and unspaced texts as Thai adults, who in turn have similar oculomotor control as readers of spaced texts. Thus, it appears that eye movements in reading converge on the optimal landing site using whatever cues are available to guide such placement.

Eye movement control in Chinese reading: A cross-sectional study.

“…Due to their insufficient reading experiences and its consequence of limited perceptual span and inefficient lexical processing, developing readers are less likely to achieve word segmentation and, thus, a higher percent of character-based saccades are observed. Similarly in Thai, another unspaced writing system, Kasisopa, Reilly, Luksaneeyanawin, Burnham (2016) found that saccade targeting was a dynamic and opportunistic process. Statistical properties of frequent word boundary characters, which is learned by children over time, can guide their FLs closer to word centers.…”

Training Children to Perceive Non-native Lexical Tones: Tone Language Background, Bilingualism, and Auditory-Visual Information

“…The decrease in performance from pre- to post-training by the monolingual tone language (Thai) 6-year-olds is puzzling. These children had just begun instruction in reading and writing at school, including learning the orthographic representation of Thai tones (a regular but complicated 4-way interaction of initial consonant class, final consonant manner, vowel length, and tone diacritics (Kasisopa et al, 2013 , 2016 ; see Davis et al, 2015 ). It is possible that these, as yet non-automatic controlled, processes involved in learning the orthographic representation of Thai tones coupled with intensive training on foreign (Mandarin) tones, resulted in overload and confusion at the perceptual level interference from L1 phoneme-to-grapheme/grapheme-to-phoneme levels.…”

The importance of the positional probability of word final (but not word initial) characters for word segmentation and identification in children and adults' natural Chinese reading.

“…We also noted earlier that in Thai, an unspaced alphabetic language, although there is no spatial word segmentation cue to guide readers' eye movements, both the positional probabilities associated with word-initial and word-final characters influence saccadic targeting to optimal landing sites. In Thai reading, initial saccades were targeted closer to the center of a word comprised of an initial and/or final character with high than low positional probability (Kasisopa et al, 2013, 2016). Thus, it appears that the positional probability of word initial characters affects word processing in Thai reading, and on the basis of the current findings, this clearly contrasts with the situation in Chinese reading.…”