It has recently been found that adult native readers of Thai, an alphabetic scriptio continua language,
engage similar oculomotor patterns as readers of languages written with spaces between words; despite
the lack of inter-word spaces, first and last characters of a word appear to guide optimal placement of
Thai readers’ eye movements, just to the left of word-centre. The issue addressed by the research
described here is whether eye movements of Thai children also show these oculomotor patterns. Here
the effect of first and last character frequency and word frequency on the eye movements of 18 Thai children
when silently reading normal unspaced and spaced text was investigated. Linear mixed-effects
model analyses of viewing time measures (first fixation duration, single fixation duration, and gaze duration)
and of landing site location revealed that Thai children’s eye movement patterns were similar to
their adult counterparts. Both first character frequency and word frequency played important roles in
Thai children’s landing sites; children tended to land their eyes further into words, close to the word centre,
if the word began with higher frequency first characters, and this effect was facilitated in higher frequency
words. Spacing also facilitated more effective use of first character frequency and it also assisted
in decreasing children’s viewing time. The use of last-character frequency appeared to be a later development,
affecting mainly single fixation duration and gaze duration. In general, Thai children use the
same oculomotor control mechanisms in reading spaced and unspaced texts as Thai adults, who in turn
have similar oculomotor control as readers of spaced texts. Thus, it appears that eye movements in reading
converge on the optimal landing site using whatever cues are available to guide such placement.