Can the First Letter Advantage Be Shaped by Script-specific Characteristics? Acknowledgements

We examined whether the first letter advantage that has been reported in the Roman script disappears, or even reverses, depending on the characteristics of the orthography. We chose Thai because it has several " nonaligned " vowels that are written prior to the consonant but phonologically follow it in speech (e.g., แฟน <ɛ:fn> is spoken as /fɛ:n/) whereas other " aligned " vowels are written and spoken in a corresponding order, as occurs in English (e.g., ฟาก is spoken as /fa:k/). We employed the forced choice decision paradigm of Adelman et al. (2010) to examine letter identification across letter positions in 3-and 4-letter Thai legal nonword pairs. Results showed an advantage of the initial letter position for the aligned legal nonwords, as occurs in Roman script (e.g., Scaltritti & Balota, 2013). However, for the nonaligned legal nonwords, an advantage of second letter position was found which is in line with the characteristics of these types of stimuli: the critical initial consonant occurs in the second letter position. These results highlight the importance of the initial phonological letter in Thai, which is crucial for mapping orthography to phonology and for lexical access. In conclusion, these results illustrate that initial letter advantage can be shaped by the characteristics of the orthography. Weigand, Scaltrittri, & Besner, in press) employed a similar paradigm as used by Adelman, Marquis, and Sabatos-DeVito (2010) to investigate accuracy in letter identification and how it varies depending on the position within the word. This paradigm involves a forced choice decision between two alternative words; one corresponding to the briefly presented target word and the other representing a distracter word. In this paradigm, the target and the distracter pairs systematically vary by a single letter in each of the positions in the word or nonword (e.g., for first position the words lung vs. sung, for second position salt vs. silt, etc.). Scaltritti and Balota (2013) using 3-to 6-letter words, legal nonwords, consonant letter strings, and symbol strings found evidence for an initial letter advantage selectively for all word and letter-related stimuli (i.e., legal nonwords and consonant letter strings), but not for symbols. An initial letter advantage has also been found in Roman script when participants identify briefly presented strings of five consonant letters (e.g., T G H K N) using a two-string of five characters is briefly presented followed by a choice of two characters, one occurring above and …