Does tonal information affect the early stages of visual-word processing in Thai?
Thai offers a unique opportunity to investigate the role of lexical tone processing during visual-word recognition, as tone is explicitly expressed in its script. In order to investigate the contribution of tone at the orthographic/phonological level during the early stages of word processing in Thai, we conducted a masked priming experiment-using both lexical decision and word naming tasks. For a given target word (e.g., ห้อง/hᴐ:ŋ2/, room), five priming conditions were created: (a) identity (e.g., ห้อง/hᴐ:ŋ2/), (b) same initial consonant, but with a different tone marker (e.g., ห่อง/hᴐ:ŋ1/), (c) different initial consonant, but with the same tone marker (e.g., ศ้อง/sᴐ:ŋ2/), (d) orthographic control (different initial consonant, different tone marker; e.g., ศ่อง/sᴐ:ŋ1/), and (e) same tone homophony, but with a different initial consonant and different tone marker (e.g., ธ่อง/t(h)ᴐ:ŋ2/). Results of the critical comparisons revealed that segmental information (i.e., consonantal information) appears to be more important than tone information (i.e., tone marker) in the early stages of visual-word processing in alphabetic, tonal languages like Thai. Thus, these findings may help constrain models of visual-word recognition and reading in tonal languages.
a Psychology, School of Human and Health Sciences , Southern Cross University , Coffs Harbour , NSW , Australia.
Heather
H
Winskel
Manuel
M
Perea
D044466:Asian People; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009275:Names; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D010700:Phonetics; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary