article review 38

Child readers’ eye movements in reading Thai

Children use first character frequency early in reading Thai and this is scaffolded by spacing and word frequency. Last character frequency appears to be a later development, and again its use is scaffolded by spacing and word frequency. The increased use of last character frequency over age from 6th to 7th Grade to adulthood may well be a result of the complexity of grapheme-to-phoneme of the last characters in Thai. As the reading skills of the readers increase the ability to use the complex grapheme-to-phoneme mapping rules of the last characters also increases. By adulthood Thai readers are using first and last character

frequencies to guide eye movements to the PVL and optimise viewing patterns. Comparing these results with those of readers of spaced scripts,it appears that the position of the PVL appears to be relatively consistent across alphabetic languages, despite such gross differences

as whether there are spaces between words or not. More generally, it appears that in the absence of spacing between words (and even if there is spacing between words) experienced readers of a scriptio continua script use the relative frequency of boundary characters as

cues for word beginning and ending to guide saccades and allocate fixation time resources. It remains to be seen how this skill might develop in younger readers of Thai. In addition, given that Thai children use character frequency to guide eye movements even when spaces are provided between words opens the possibility that readers of spaced scripts might also use character frequency to guide eye movements but that this is less powerful than spaces, and has not been detected in spaced text reading as it has not been included as a factor in extant studies.

This study provides evidence that young Thai readers use first character frequency to land their eyes at the PVL and use first and last character frequencies to optimise viewing patterns with both of these scaffolded to varying degrees by word frequency and spaces between words. As only relatively older children were tested here (at the end of primary: 6th Grade, and at the start of secondary: 7th Grade) it will be of interest to investigate the relative roles and the interplay of spacing and boundary character frequency on eye movements and fixation patterns in much younger children. This is now possible using head-free, tracking systems. A longitudinal study is now in progress with Thai children testing them first when they are in Grade 1 (where they are taught to read with spaces) and following them through the transition from spaced text in Grade 1 to unspaced text in Grade 2 and beyond. Such investigations will elucidate whether and what developmental role first character frequency in conjunction with word spacing plays in reading development, and the age at which last character frequency also begins to be used as a cue.