How orthographic-specific characteristics shape letter position coding: The case of Thai script

Abstract

A central question for any model of visual word identification is the representation of the position at which letters are encoded (e.g., calm vs. clam). In this article, we examine whether the orthographic-specific characteristics of a writing system-namely, Thai-shape the process of letter position coding. Thai is an alphabetic script that lacks interword spaces and has an orthographic order that does not necessarily correspond to the phonological order for initial vowels. This implies that the initial letter position coding in Thai needs to be flexible enough that readers can successfully encode the letter positions of words. To compare letter position coding in Thai to that in English, we conducted an experiment that paralleled Experiment 3 in Gomez, Ratcliff, and Perea (Psychological Review, 115, 577-600, 2008), including 23 conditions (single-letter replacements, letter transpositions, letter migrations, and a corresponding control). We obtained fits from Gomez et al.'s overlap model, which is a model that has been shown to account for letter position coding in the Roman alphabet across this variety of letter manipulations. The overlap model was found to successfully fit the Thai data. Our results revealed that the position encoding was better for the first letter than for the rest of the positions in both languages; however, in English the position uncertainty grows as a function of letter order quite abruptly, whereas in Thai it grows gradually. Thus, the orthographic-specific characteristics of the Thai writing system do play a role in shaping the process of letter position coding.

Can the first letter advantage be shaped by script-specific characteristics?

“…Results revealed that there was no apparent difference in degree of disruption caused when reading internal and initial transposed-letter pseudowords. This was in marked contrast with results found in Roman script where greater disruption was caused by initial than internal transpositions (e.g., White, Johnson, Liversedge, & Rayner, 2008; see also Perea, Winskel, & Gomez, 2017, for an examination of the modeling differences between English and Thai in letter position coding).…”

The impact of text orientation on form priming effects in four-character Chinese words.

“…What is most relevant to the present discussion is that models making this assumption predict that transposed letter (TL) nonwords (e.g., jugde) are no more similar to their base words (i.e., JUDGE) than are substituted letter (SL) nonwords (e.g., jupte) and, therefore, the two types of nonwords should produce equivalent priming effects for their base word in masked priming experiments. More recent behavioral (e.g., Lété & Fayol, 2013; Perea & Lupker, 2003a, 2003b, 2004; Perea, Winskel, & Gómez, 2018), and event-related potential (ERP) results (e.g., Ktori, Kingma, Hannagan, Holcomb, & Grainger, 2014; Vergara-Martínez, Perea, Gómez, & Swaab, 2013), however, have failed to support this prediction. That is, many studies have shown that TL nonwords appear to be considerably more similar to their base words than are SL nonwords.…”

Transposition Effects in an Aksharic Writing System: The Case of Hindi

“…1.3.1 TEs in different languages. The TEs that are produced by transposing letters of the Roman alphabet have been observed in a variety of language families, including Germanic (English: Lupker, et al, 2008), Romance (French: Schoonbaert & Grainger 2004;Spanish: Perea & Lupker, 2004), pre-Indo European (Basque: Perea & Carreiras, 2006;Perea et al, 2018), Semitic (Maltese: , and Uralic (Hungarian: Tóth & Csépe, 2016). These spoken languages vary with respect to their phonological and morphological properties, and findings of similar TEs across them have been used as evidence that the effects occur early in the visual word recognition process primarily at the orthographic level (Grainger, 2008;Perea & Carreiras, 2006a, 2006bbut see Frost, 2012).…”