Departamento de Metodología, Universitat de València, Av. Blasco Ibáñez, 21, 46010, Valencia, Spain.
Southern Cross University, Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2018 Feb;25(1):416-422. doi: 10.3758/s13423-017-1279-7.
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.
任何视觉单词识别模型的核心问题都是表示字母编码位置的表示形式（例如，calm 与 clam）。在本文中，我们检验了书写系统的特定于正字法的特征（即泰语）是否会影响字母位置编码的过程。泰语是一种字母文字，没有单词之间的空格，并且其正字法顺序不一定与初始元音的语音顺序相对应。这意味着泰语中初始字母位置编码需要足够灵活，以便读者能够成功编码单词的字母位置。为了将泰语中的字母位置编码与英语进行比较，我们进行了一项实验，该实验与 Gomez、Ratcliff 和 Perea（《心理评论》，115，577-600，2008）的实验 3 平行进行，包括 23 种条件（单个字母替换、字母换位、字母迁移和相应的对照）。我们从 Gomez 等人的重叠模型中获得了拟合结果，该模型已被证明可以解释在各种字母操作下的罗马字母的字母位置编码。重叠模型成功地适用于泰语数据。我们的结果表明，在两种语言中，位置编码对于第一个字母都比其余位置要好；但是，在英语中，位置不确定性随着字母顺序的增加而急剧增加，而在泰语中则逐渐增加。因此，泰语书写系统的特定于正字法的特征确实会影响字母位置编码的过程。
