Traditionally, psycholinguistic research has focused on a small number of languages and writing systems, and predominantly English and Roman script. Clearly, if we are to build more comprehensive and representative universal models of psycholinguistic mechanisms and processes, we need to conduct research on a diverse range of languages and scripts. The rich scripts and writing systems of the South and Southeast Asian region offer extremely fascinating opportunities for psycholinguistic research.

First, to set the stage, a general introduction to the different writing systems will be given. Following on from this, a description of Thai language and its script will be outlined. Then some recent research that has been conducted on visual-word recognition and reading in Thai will be discussed.

Dr Heather Winskel is a Senior lecturer in Psychology at SCU. She joined SCU last year. Her research focus is predominantly in the area of language acquisition and reading and writing research, particularly on languages and scripts of the South and Southeast Asian region.

Dr Winskel holds a B.Sc. from Sussex University and a PhD from Durham University, U.K. in crosslinguistic language acquisition. The fieldwork for her PhD was conducted in a Lisu village in the North of Thailand. Previously, she has worked at Durham, Edinburgh, and Birmingham Universities, at the Open University in the U.K., and at the Prince of Songkhla, Chiangmai, and Chulalongkorn Universities in Thailand.

Dr Winskel is currently the chief editor of a book on South and Southeast Asian Psycholinguistics with Cambridge University Press due to be published next year. Over 50 international experts in psycholinguistics have contributed chapters.

Winskel, H. & Padakannaya, P. (2013). South and Southeast Asian Psycholinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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