READING WITHOUT SPACES BETWEEN WORDS: EYE MOVEMENTS IN READING THAI Benjawan Kasisopa Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy MARCS Auditory Laboratories University of Western Sydney Revision submission January, 2011 STATEMENT OF AUTHENTICATION I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and, to the best of my knowledge, it contains no material previously published or written by any other person, nor material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree at the University of Western Sydney, or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. opa ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are so many nice and generous people that I would like to thank. First of all, I would like to thank my principal supervisor, Professor Denis Burnham, for all the opportunities, support and understanding he gave me over the years. I couldn‟t imagine how I could complete this thesis without his great support as well as his patience. I really appreciate his knowledge and skills in many areas, psychology, statistical analysis and also his patience with my writing skills. Thank you so much for being such a great supervisor. A million thanks to my co-supervisor, Professor Ronan Reilly, for all the technical help and all the hard work that he has put in for me, for his tolerance of my lack of technical skills, and for all his brilliant tools that made my life a lot easier in dealing with the complicated eye movement data and the analysis models. Thank you also for allowing me to take some time to work with him and his students at Department of Computer Science, National University of Ireland, Maynooth. I‟m grateful that he was always there to help regardless of the 10-hour time difference between us! Also many thanks to all Professor Reilly‟s PhD students for the great time during my stay in Maynooth, and especially to Mr. Siliang Tang, for creating so many great programs and kindly allowing me to use them. I would also like to thank Dr. Sudaporn Luksaneeyanawin for allowing me to take over the Centre for Speech and Language Processing (CRSLP) lab at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok to use as the hub for my data collection from time to time. I always had a good and productive time when visiting and working at CRSLP. None of the studies in this thesis would have been possible without her support. Thanks to Dr. Heather Winskel and Professor Ralph Radach who were on my supervisory panel and also to Professor Chris Davis, Associate Professor Jeesun Kim, Associate Professor Kate Stevens and Dr. Christian Kroos for all their help and advice. I would also like to thank all the academic and support staff at MARCS Auditory Laboratories, especially Gail Charlton for all the administrative support as well as for her help regarding travel arrangements for field work and conferences; Darlene Williams and Karen McConachie for all the administrative and funding arrangements; Colin Schoknecht, Johnson Chen and Steven Fazio for all their technical support – I would have lost data without all your help; and last but not least, Kym Buckley, without whom I would not have been able to finish this thesis; thank you Kym for all your help in formatting the raw material into a presentable thesis. I would like to thank all the students at MARCS; thank you so much for all the help. You have all made my life so far away from my home enjoyable and not as lonely as I expected, with special thanks to Nan Xu and Lidija Krebs-Lazendic for being more like family than friends. Finally, I would like to thank my family – I could not have done this without their support – and to all my friends back home who helped find information and even assisted in recruiting participants for the studies. Thank you so much to you all [ขอบคุณมากๆ คะ่ ] TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. READING ACQUISITION, WRITING SYSTEM AND THAI LANGUAGE 6 1.1. Reading Acquisition ....................................................................................... 8 1.2. Writing Systems ........................................................................................... 13 1.2.1. Ideographic Writing Systems ............................................................... 13 1.2.2. Alphabetic Writing Systems ................................................................. 14 1.3. Thai Language .............................................................................................. 15 1.3.1. Thai Script ............................................................................................ 16 1.3.2. Thai Orthography ................................................................................. 19 1.4. Learning to Read in Thai .............................................................................. 29 1.4.1. Literacy Instruction in Thailand ........................................................... 29 1.4.2. Issues in Literacy Development and Reading ...................................... 31 2. EYE MOVEMENTS IN READING .................................................................. 33 2.1. Introduction .................................................................................................. 33 2.2. Measurements of Eye Movements in Reading ............................................. 34 2.3. Approaches in Eye Movement Studies ......................................................... 36 2.4. Models of Eye Movement Control in Reading ............................................. 39 2.4.1. E-Z Reader Model ................................................................................ 40 2.4.2. Strategy-tactics/S-T .............................................................................. 44 2.4.3. Glenmore Model ................................................................................... 46 2.5. Eye Movements in Reading Spaced and Unspaced Texts ............................ 49 2.5.1. Reading With and Without Spaces in Spaced Languages .................... 50 2.5.2. Reading With and Without Spaces in Scriptio Continua Languages .. 57 2.6. Eye Movements in Reading of Children ...................................................... 67 2.7. Issues in Eye Movements in Reading Thai Text .......................................... 69 3. EXPERIMENT 1: READING TIME STUDIES .............................................. 72 3.1. Participants ................................................................................................... 73 3.1.1. Reading Ability Screening Test ............................................................ 74 3.1.2. Speech Production Screening Test ....................................................... 75 3.2. Experiment 1: Relative Frequency of Initial and Final Characters Effects .. 75 3.2.1. Materials ............................................................................................... 76 3.2.2. Apparatus .............................................................................................. 80 3.2.3. Procedure .............................................................................................. 81 3.2.4. Hypotheses ........................................................................................... 83 3.3. Results .......................................................................................................... 84 3.4. Discussion ..................................................................................................... 97 4. EXPERIMENT 2: ADULT READERS’ EYE MOVEMENTS IN READING THAI .......................................................................................................................... 102 4.1. Introduction ................................................................................................ 102 4.2. Method ........................................................................................................ 103 4.2.1. Participants ......................................................................................... 103 4.2.2. Materials ............................................................................................. 103 4.2.3. Apparatus ............................................................................................ 109 4.2.4. Procedure ............................................................................................ 110 4.2.5. Hypotheses ......................................................................................... 112 4.3. Results ........................................................................................................ 113 4.3.1. Analysis Set I (Target Words, Predetermine Planned Fixed Effects) 115 4.3.2. Analysis Set II (Target Words, Additional Fixed Effects) ................. 124 4.3.3. Analysis Set III (Sentences, Additional Fixed Effects) ...................... 128 4.4. Discussion ................................................................................................... 135 5. EXPERIMENT 3: CHILD READERS’ EYE MOVEMENTS IN READING THAI .......................................................................................................................... 139 5.1. Introduction ................................................................................................ 140 5.2. Method ........................................................................................................ 140 5.2.1. Participants ......................................................................................... 140 5.2.2. Materials ............................................................................................. 142 5.2.3.