Reading and Writing in Southeast Asian Languages

AbstractTraditionally, research on reading and writing has focused on a limited number of European languages, in particular English. More recently, there has been a growing interest in conducting research on more diverse languages and scripts. There is a dearth of research conducted on the languages of Southeast Asia. By including these languages and scripts, we can build more comprehensive and representative universal models of reading and writing. In this paper, the characteristics of the languages and writing systems of Southeast Asia will be briefly reviewed. Subsequently, some research that has been conducted on Thai and Malaysian/Indonesian will be focused on. Finally, some suggestions for future research will be made

An Early Reading Assessment Battery for Multilingual Learners in Malaysia

The aim of the study was to develop a new comprehensive reading assessment battery for multi-ethnic and multilingual learners in Malaysia. Using this assessment battery, we examined the reliability, validity, and dimensionality of the factors associated with reading difficulties/disabilities in the Malay language, a highly transparent alphabetic orthography. In order to further evaluate the reading assessment battery, we compared results from the assessment battery with those obtained from the Malaysian national screening instrument. In the study, 866 Grade 1 children from multi-ethnic and multilingual backgrounds from 11 government primary schools participated. The reading assessment battery comprised 13 assessments, namely, reading comprehension, spelling, listening comprehension, letter name knowledge, letter name fluency, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy, word reading efficiency, oral reading fluency, expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, elision, and phonological memory. High reliability and validity were found for the assessments. An exploratory factor analysis yielded three main constructs: phonological-decoding, sublexical-fluency, and vocabulary-memory. Phonological-decoding was found to be the most reliable construct that distinguished between at-risk and non-at-risk children. Identifying these underlying factors will be useful for detecting children at-risk for developing reading difficulties in the Malay language. In addition, these results highlight the importance of including a range of reading and reading-related measures for the early diagnosis of reading difficulties in this highly transparent orthography

Object categorisation using Malay Shape-based numeral classifiers.

Categorisation is fundamental in human cognition and language development. Crosslinguistic studies on categorisation propose numeral classifiers as a linguistic manifestation of human categorisation and conceptualisation. Thus, studies on numeral classifier acquisition enable researchers to examine how children learn to categorise objects in their environment using a constrained framework, and how this ability becomes more refined as children grow older. This study investigated the strategies children utilise in categorising objects into eight Malay shape-based numeral classifier categories using a paired discrimination task. One-hundred-and-forty-eight children ranging in age from 6 to 9 years and a comparison group of adults participated in this study. Results revealed that children categorised objects more readily when there was a strong (two-perceptual feature distinction) than weak (one-perceptual feature distinction) contrast, and when exemplars were typical rather than atypical. There appears to be a gradual transition from a perceptually biased to a broader, more rule-based system

Malay numeral classifier usage in caretaker-child talk

To the nativists and cognitivists, input plays a minor role in language acquisition;however, more recent studies have shown that to a certain extent, the frequency and usage of lexical terms in children’s linguistic environment do play a role in language development, especially when they involve interaction. This paper presents an investigation on the usage of eight Malay shape-based numeral classifiers in eleven caretaker-child interactions. A semi-structured elicited procedure was designed to stimulate the caretaker and child to interact with each other in a naturalistic setting. Since Malay numeral classifiers are most prominently observed in counting activities, an interactive game was designed to identify what numeral classifiers caretakers would choose to talk about more in a situation where all numeral classifiers had the same chance to be talked about. Caretakers’ usage of numeral classifiers and their reactions to children’s usage of numeral classifiers are highlighted in this paper. Results indicate that Malay numeral classifier usage is not pervasive in Malay caretaker-child interactions. They suggest that the degree of obligatoriness of numeral classifiers in the Malay grammar plays a role in caretakers’ numeral classifier usage and their reactions to children’s usage

The pragmatic functions of numeral classifiers in modern Malay written corpus

Numeral classifiers are primarily used to provide semantic information about the physical and functional properties of objects, the cognitive categories of objects in a particular culture, and the perceptions of the speakers within a particular speech community towards the objects. Numeral classifiers of Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese and Thai have been found to perform pragmatic functions as well. To identify if Malay does use numeral classifiers to perform a number of pragmatic functions, we analysed a 73,000- word modern Malay corpus targeted at both adult and young audience. Results indicate that in the modern Malay corpus, the Malay numeral classifiers perform several pragmatic functions in various contexts: they function as anaphoric and cataphoric references, as indicators of definiteness and indefiniteness, and as foregrounding mechanisms in modern Malay discourse. Using twelve instances of numeral classifier usage and omission in the modern Malay corpus, this study proposes that the absence of numeral classifiers in texts is not likely to be due to language users’ ignorance of the need to use a numeral classifier or of the correct form of numeral classifiers. On the contrary, the absence of numeral classifiers in the corpus exhibits the Malay language users’knowledge of the pragmatic functions of Malay numeral classifiers

Experimenting different Jawi spelling conditions to gauge their cognitive complexity

Although traditionally, Malay was predominantly written in the Arabic script (Jawi), the Roman script has become the standard script for the Malay language after the Second World War due to the relative complexity of Jawi in comparison to the Roman script. One factor that makes reading Jawi a cognitively complex process is the complex and confusing use of vowel letters in the spelling of Malay words in Jawi; hence, making the Jawi spelling system appear to be rather inconsistent. Currently, the vowel phonemes in Malay words in Jawi are represented differently in different syllables either using vowel letters or not represented at all. Two reading experiments on Malay bi-syllabic words written in Jawi were conducted with two groups of readers. In Experiment 1, 28 Malay native speakers and 13 Arabic native speakers read 200 Malay bi-syllabic words in Jawi as quickly and as accurately as possible to investigate the naming latencies of words written in Jawi with and without diacritics. In Experiment 2, 30 Malay 13- and 14-year-olds read 108 Malay bi-syllabic words in Jawi to investigate if adding vowel diacritics and/or vowel letters to represent Malay vowels facilitates reading Jawi. Both experiments were conducted using DMDX, a Win 32-based display system for psychological experiments that records reaction times to visual and auditory stimuli. Results are presented in terms of the subjects‟ reading accuracy (correct responses) and latency (reaction times). To a great extent, adding vowel diacritics to the Jawi spelling system does facilitate reading. This study also shows that two forms of permutations in the Jawi spelling system can help make reading Jawi a cognitively less complex process for readers

Spelling Development in Thai Children

Thai, a tonal language, has a distinctive alphabetic orthography. In the current study, spelling development in Thai children is examined. A number of predictions about spelling development and types of errors are made based on previous research on other orthographies in conjunction with the characteristics of Thai language and its orthography. Spelling of words was assessed in 60 Thai children ranging in age from 7 years to 9 years from Grade(s) 1, 2, and 3. After 4 months of school, Grade 1 children achieved 32% correct, Grade 2 children 85% correct, and Grade 3 children 87% correct for word spelling. Spelling performance rapidly increased between the youngest Grade 1 children and the older children with relatively few errors made by the older children. We found striking commonalities with other orthographies previously studied and also orthography-specific characteristics emerged. Homophonous consonants, consonant clusters, visually similar letters, vowel length, and other irregularities in the orthography posed significant challenges to young learners. As predicted the complex vowel combinations and tone system also proved problematic