Thai, a Sino-Tibetan language is a tonal, uninflected and predominantly
monosyllabic language. Thai has its own distinctive alphabetic script with syllabic
characteristics as it has implicit vowels for some consonants. Consonants are written
in a linear order, but vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either
side of the consonant. Of particular interest to the current study are that vowels can
precede the consonant in writing but follow it in speech similar to Devanagari, for
example the word ‘flat’ is spoken as /bɛ:n/, or in a more severely
misaligned example the word ‘insect’ is
spoken as /m(a)lɛ:ŋ/ (an implicit vowel (a) has been inserted) where the vowel
operates across syllables. The current study aims to investigate if there is a
processing cost due to this misalignment between spatial positioning and temporal
sequencing for vowels in Thai, and the implications this has in relation to the grain
size used by adults and children when reading Thai.