Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, Republic of Singapore.
Behav Res Methods. 2010 Nov;42(4):992-1003. doi: 10.3758/BRM.42.4.992.
Malay, a language spoken by 250 million people, has a shallow alphabetic orthography, simple syllable structures, and transparent affixation--characteristics that contrast sharply with those of English. In the present article, we first compare the letter-phoneme and letter-syllable ratios for a sample of alphabetic orthographies to highlight the importance of separating language-specific from language-universal reading processes. Then, in order to develop a better understanding of word recognition in orthographies with more consistent mappings to phonology than English, we compiled a database of lexical variables (letter length, syllable length, phoneme length, morpheme length, word frequency, orthographic and phonological neighborhood sizes, and orthographic and phonological Levenshtein distances) for 9,592 Malay words. Separate hierarchical regression analyses for Malay and English revealed how the consistency of orthography-phonology mappings selectively modulates the effects of different lexical variables on lexical decision and speeded pronunciation performance. The database of lexical and behavioral measures for Malay is available at http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.
马来语是一种有 2.5 亿人使用的语言，它的字母表拼写法较浅，音节结构简单，并且有明显的附加成分——这些特点与英语形成了鲜明的对比。在本文中，我们首先比较了一些字母表拼写法的字母-音素和字母-音节比率，以突出将语言特定和语言普遍的阅读过程分开的重要性。然后，为了更好地理解与英语相比具有更一致的语音映射的拼字法中的单词识别，我们为 9592 个马来语单词编制了一个词汇变量（字母长度、音节长度、音素长度、词素长度、单词频率、正字法和语音邻域大小以及正字法和语音 Levenshtein 距离）数据库。针对马来语和英语的单独分层回归分析揭示了拼字法-语音映射的一致性如何选择性地调节不同词汇变量对词汇判断和快速发音性能的影响。马来语的词汇和行为测量数据库可在 http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental 上获取。
