Winskel, H., Radach, R., & Luksaneeyanawin, S. (2009). Eye movements when reading spaced and unspaced Thai and English: A comparison of Thai-English bilinguals and English monolinguals. Journal of Memory and Language, 61, 339-351. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Eye movements while reading an unspaced writing system: The case of Thai
Vision Research, 2013
Thai has an alphabetic script with a distinctive feature -it has no spaces between words. Since previous research with spaced alphabetic systems (e.g., English) has suggested that readers use spaces to guide eye movements, it is of interest to investigate what physical factors might guide Thai readers' eye movements. Here the effects of word-initial and word-final position-specific character frequency, wordboundary bigram frequency, and overall word frequency on 30 Thai adults' eye movements when reading 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 sites were conducted. Thai readers tended to land their first fixation at or near the centre of words, just as readers of spaced texts do. A critical determinant of this was word boundary characters: higher position-specific frequency of initial and of final characters significantly facilitated landing sites closer to the word centre while word-boundary bigram frequency appeared to behave as a proxy for initial and final position-specific character frequency. It appears, therefore, that Thai readers make use of the position-specific frequencies of word boundary characters in targeting words and directing eye movements to an optimal landing site.
uv.es, 2012
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 if 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 eye movements of fifty-four participants were recorded while reading sentences silently. There was no apparent difference in degree of disruption caused when reading initial and internal transposed-letter nonwords.
One controversial question in the field of eye movements and reading is whether there is evidence of parafoveal-on-foveal effects. This is an important issue because some models of eye movements in reading make quite different predictions in this respect (e.g., E-Z Reader vs. SWIFT models). The aim of the current study was to investigate if parafovealon-foveal effects occur when reading Thai, an unspaced, alphasyllabic orthography. Word frequency (high and low) of the word to the right of the currently fixated word was manipulated to examine if it would influence processing of the fixated word. Thirty-six participants read single sentences while having their eye movements monitored. There was no evidence of the effect of word frequency of the parafoveal word on fixation duration measures of the foveal word, as assessed by p(H 0 |D) values -except for a marginal effect in the skipping rates. Thus, the present data are in line with previous studies using spaced Indo-European languages which have found small/null results for parafoveal effects of word frequency during one-line sentence reading.
Eye movement control in reading unspaced text: the case of the Japanese script
Vision research, 2001
The present study examines the landing-site distributions of the eyes during natural reading of Japanese script: a script that mixes three different writing systems (Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana) and that misses regular spacing between words. The results show a clear preference of the eyes to land at the beginning rather than the center of the word. In addition, it was found that the eyes land on Kanji characters more frequently than on Hiragana or Katakana characters. Further analysis for two- and three-character words indicated that the eye's landing-site distribution differs depending on type of the characters in the word: the eyes prefer to land at the word beginning only when the initial character of the word is a Kanji character. For pure Hiragana words, the proportion of initial fixations did not differ between character positions. Thus, as already indicated by Kambe (National Institute of Japanese Language Report 85 (1986) 29), the visual distinctiveness of the three Ja...
Child readers' eye movements in reading Thai
Vision research, 2016
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 freque...
Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2013
In English and other alphabetic systems read from left to right, the useful information acquired during each fixational pause is generally reported to extend 14-15 character spaces to the right of each fixation, but only 3-4 character spaces to the left, and certainly no farther than the beginning of the fixated word. However, this leftward extent is remarkably small and seems inconsistent with the general bilateral symmetry of vision. Accordingly, in the present study we investigated the influence of a fundamental component of text to the left of fixation-interword spaces-using a well-established eyetracking paradigm in which invisible boundaries were set up along individual sentence displays that were then read. Each boundary corresponded to the leftmost edge of a word in a sentence, so that as the eyes crossed a boundary, interword spaces in the text to the left of that word were obscured (by inserting a letter x). The proximity of the obscured text during each fixational pause w...
The role of interword spacing in reading Japanese: An eye movement study
Vision research, 2007
The present study investigated the role of interword spacing in a naturally unspaced language, Japanese. Eye movements were registered of native Japanese readers reading pure Hiragana (syllabic) and mixed Kanji-Hiragana (ideographic and syllabic) text in spaced and unspaced conditions. Interword spacing facilitated both word identification and eye guidance when reading syllabic script, but not when the script contained ideographic characters. We conclude that in reading Hiragana interword spacing serves as an effective segmentation cue. In contrast, spacing information in mixed Kanji-Hiragana text is redundant, since the visually salient Kanji characters serve as effective segmentation cues by themselves.
Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 1989
In Experiment 1, duration of eye fixations, saccade magnitude, saccade velocity, and regressive eye movements were measured during alphabet-like kana-(both katakana and hirakana) and logographic kanji-based Japanese text reading. The results suggest that katakana reading required longer fixation durations (about 240 msec) with small saccade magnitude (about 3 0 , which corresponds to 3.5 letters), whereas kanji-based reading required shorter fixation durations (about 170 msec) with larger saccade magnitude (about 50, which corresponds to 6 letters). Eye movement characteristics ofhirakana-based text fell in between. The frequency of the regressive eye movements was found to be significantly large for katakana text. In Experiment 2, interlanguage (English-Japanese) comparison was made with changing difficulty levels. The results showed that, for texts of the same difficulty, English required longer fixation durations from Japanese students than did Japanese texts, but no significant difference was found between difficulty levels. These results strongly suggest that the text processing for phonogram-based kana components and ideogram-based kanji components was different in terms of reading strategies, and that longer fixation durations were needed by Japanese students for reading English as compared with Japanese texts.
Reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text: Evidence from eye movements
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2008
Native Chinese readers' eye movements were monitored as they read text that did or did not demark word boundary information. In Experiment 1, sentences had 4 types of spacing: normal unspaced text, text with spaces between words, text with spaces between characters that yielded nonwords, and finally text with spaces between every character. The authors investigated whether the introduction of spaces into unspaced Chinese text facilitates reading and whether the word or, alternatively, the character is a unit of information that is of primary importance in Chinese reading. Global and local measures indicated that sentences with unfamiliar word spaced format were as easy to read as visually familiar unspaced text. Nonword spacing and a space between every character produced longer reading times. In Experiment 2, highlighting was used to create analogous conditions: normal Chinese text, highlighting that marked words, highlighting that yielded nonwords, and highlighting that marked each character. The data from both experiments clearly indicated that words, and not individual characters, are the unit of primary importance in Chinese reading.