The View from Asian Writing Systems: Eye Movement Control in Reading Thai and Chinese
Ronan G. Reilly* andInthraporn Aranyanak
National University of Ireland Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland
Introduction
Writing systems are a uniquely human artifact, the product of a confluence of many constraints: the nature of the language whence they have arisen, limitations of human perception and memory, the uniqueness of regional history and culture, to name a few. For a considerable portion of the approximately 5000 years of writing’s existence, the skills of inscribing and deciphering were the preserve of an elite (Harris 1989). However, with the technological innovations of movable type printing in Europe and the spread of large scale, compulsory education, mass literacy came of age in Europe around the middle of the 19th century (Vincent 2000). While movable type printing was first invented in China almost 400 years prior to Gutenberg and again in Korea contemporaneously with Gutenberg, it was the combination of an alphabetic writing system and movable type that was crucial to its widespread adoption.
Corresponding author: Email: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
Because reading is an acquired skill involving the decoding of patterns of visual stimulation into a linguistic and ultimately a conceptual representation, it has proven a popular experimental domain for the controlled study of the interplay of perception, language, and cognition. As Huey (1908) observed in his seminal work “The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading” first published just over a century ago, to understand reading fully would require a deep understanding of the functioning of the brain as a whole. While Huey's ultimate goal remains elusive to this day, we have made considerable progress in developing a deeper understanding of many of the components of the reading process.
One particularly successful line of attack has been the development of computational models of reading, particularly illuminating the dynamics of information processing in reading on the basis of eye movement data (e.g., Reilly and Radach 2006; Engbert et al. 2005; Reichle et al. 1998). Notwithstanding their evident success, they have been limited in their generality by their predominant focus on Roman-derived writing systems. Moreover, until fairly recently there has been a dearth of empirical studies of continuous reading of non-Roman writing systems. In contrast to languages like English, German and French there is very little literature on visual, orthographic, lexical and sentence level processing in the many alternative writing systems. This is not only hampering the development of a comprehensive psycholinguistic understanding of these written languages, it also precludes analysis of how their features give rise to differential effects on reader performance. This, in turn, creates difficulties in the transfer of research findings into the educational field analogous to the increasingly widespread application of such knowledge to European orthographies (see Rayner et al. 2001, for a seminal example).
The aim of this chapter is to address some of the shortcomings in writing system coverage and to throw an informative light on several contentious issues of debate in current comparative reading research. In particular, we describe aspects of the eye movement behaviour of readers of Thai and Chinese. Of primary interest are the mechanisms whereby readers optimise the pick-up of information from the text by positioning their eyes on or near the centre of words (Rayner 1979).
In English, word targeting is facilitated by the presence of spaces at word boundaries. In writing systems such as Thai and Chinese, which do not employ explicit boundaries, there are few convenient clues with which to identify word boundaries. In what follows, we will provide both empirical and computational modelling evidence of the targeting strategies readers appear to use in situations where they have limited information about the location of word centres.
