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Reading and spelling acquisition in Thai children

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Abstract

Thai, a tonal language, has its own distinctive alphabetic orthography. The study investigates reading and spelling development in Thai children, with an aim of examining the grain size that is predominantly used when reading and spelling. Furthermore, word and nonword lists were developed to examine the acquisition of the complex system of vowels and tone rules in Thai. Reading and spelling of words and nonwords were assessed in 60 Thai children ranging in age from 7 to 9 years 8 months from Grade(s) 1, 2, and 3. A lexicality effect was found for both reading and spelling. Spelling lagged behind reading in the Grade 1 children. Development rapidly increased between the youngest Grade 1 children and the older Grade 2 and 3 children. For word reading there were significantly more lexical errors than phonological errors. Beginning readers appear to predominantly use a larger lexico-syllabic grain size to read Thai.

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Notes

  1. There are 4 archaic letters; , which are rarely used.

  2. Tones are marked in the Thai examples cited in this paper as follows; 0 = mid, 1 = low, 2 = falling, 3 = high, 4 = rising. This system is based on the system that was developed at the Linguistics Research Unit (LRU) of Chulalongkorn University (Luksaneeyanawin, 2004). IPA transcription is used for the transcription of all other Thai text.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, University of Western Sydney, PO Box 1767, Penrith South, NSW, 1767, Australia

    Heather Winskel

  2. Center for Research in Speech and Language Processing (CRSLP), Chulalongkorn University, Phaya Thai Road, Pathumwan, Bangkok, 10330, Thailand

    Kanyarat Iemwanthong

Authors
  1. Heather Winskel
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  2. Kanyarat Iemwanthong
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Correspondence to Heather Winskel.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 5.

Table 5 Thai initial consonants (IPA symbols are in parenthesis)
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Appendix 2

See List 1.

List 1 The words and nonwords for the vowel reading task
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Appendix 3

See List 2.

List 2 The words and nonwords for the tone reading task
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Winskel, H., Iemwanthong, K. Reading and spelling acquisition in Thai children. Read Writ 23, 1021–1053 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-009-9194-6

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