Misaligned vowels – is there a processing cost?

In Thai vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant.Of particular interest to the current study is that some vowels can precede the consonant in writing but follow it in speech, hence a mismatch between the spoken and written sequence occurs, e.g. the word pen would be written as epn or camel written as ecaml. A processing cost has been found for these misaligned vowels in Devanagari in Hindi speakers (Vaid & Gupta, 2002). In order to investigate this discrepancy between spatial positioning and temporal sequencing for vowels in Thai, eye movements of twenty university students reading 50 pairs of words with misaligned and aligned vowel words matched for length and frequency embedded in same sentence frames was conducted. In addition, rapid naming data from 40 adults was collected. Behavioural data from children 6 to 9 years old reading and spelling comparable words was also analysed. Results from these studies will be discussed in relation to the overriding question whether there is an additional processing cost due to this mismatch and the implications this has in relation to the grain size used when reading Thai

Real words, phantom words and impossible words

Because spoken language arrives as a continuous signal, recognising words in real speech requires segmentation of the speech stream. Current computational models of spoken-word recognition involve a competition process which assists with segmentation without requiring explicit word-boundary knowledge. Studies of vocabulary structure and of a real-speech corpus will be described which show that English encourages competition; most words have "phantom" words embedded within them. Experimental evidence will be presented supporting the claim that spoken-word recognition by human listeners involves such active competition between candidate words, but also the exploitation of cues to segmentation, and moreover that listeners are sensitive to what could and could not be a possible word of their language. This latter constraint on the recognition words can be incorporated into a competition model of spoken-word recognition, and provides a simple and powerful account of a range of empirical data

Orthographic congruency effects in the suprasegmental domain: evidence from Thai.

The influence of orthographic knowledge on lexical tone processing was examined by manipulating the congruency between the tone and the tone marker of Thai monosyllabic words presented in three metalinguistic tasks. In tone monitoring (Experiment 1) and same-different tone judgement (Experiment 2)--that is, tasks that require an explicit analysis of tone information---an orthographic congruency effect was observed: Better performance was found when both tone and tone marker led to the same response than when they led to opposite, competing responses. In rhyme judgement (Experiment 3), a metaphonological task that allows tone to be processed in a more natural way since it does not require explicit analysis of tone, the orthographic effect emerged only when the interstimulus interval was lengthened from 30 to 1,200 ms. In addition to demonstrating the generalization of the orthographic congruency effect to the suprasegmental domain in Thai, the present data also suggest relatively late and task-dependent activation of orthographic representations of tone.Journal ArticleResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov'tSCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

The expression of temporal relations in Thai children\u27s narratives

The acquisition of temporal relations in the narratives of Thai children (aged4 years, 6 years and 9 years) and of adults as control was investigated. Narrativeswere elicited using the ‘frog story’. Results revealed common and languagespecific developmental patterns: (1) a developmental progression from relating events at a local to a more global level; (2) use of fewer forms that have abroader range of functions in the younger children; (3) acquisition of leastrestricted forms prior to more restricted forms; (4) qualified support for theacquisition of sequentiality prior to simultaneity. In the youngest childrenthere was a greater reliance on usage of grammatical aspect; subsequently, aschildren acquired the ability to use bi-referential reference, temporal connectives played a more significant role. Eventually mature narrators are able to usea combination of explicit and implicit linguistic device

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\u27s 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 54 participants were recorded while they were reading sentences silently. There was no apparent difference in degree of disruption caused when reading initial and internal transposed-letter nonwords. These findings give support to the view that letter position encoding in Thai is relatively flexible and that actual identity of the letter is more critical than letter position. This flexible encoding strategy is in line with the characteristics of Thai—that is, the flexibility in the ordering of the letters and the lack of interword spaces, which creates a certain level of ambiguity in relation to the demarcation of word boundaries. These findings point to script-specific effects operating in letter encoding in visual-word recognition and reading