Development and validation of a reading-related assessment battery in Malay for the purpose of dyslexia assessment

Abstract

Malay is an alphabetic language with transparent orthography. A Malay reading-related assessment battery which was conceptualised based on the International Dyslexia Association definition of dyslexia was developed and validated for the purpose of dyslexia assessment. The battery consisted of ten tests: Letter Naming, Word Reading, Non-word Reading, Spelling, Passage Reading, Reading Comprehension, Listening Comprehension, Elision, Rapid Letter Naming and Digit Span. Content validity was established by expert judgment. Concurrent validity was obtained using the schools' language tests as criterion. Evidence of predictive and construct validity was obtained through regression analyses and factor analyses. Phonological awareness was the most significant predictor of word-level literacy skills in Malay, with rapid naming making independent secondary contributions. Decoding and listening comprehension made separate contributions to reading comprehension, with decoding as the more prominent predictor. Factor analysis revealed four factors: phonological decoding, phonological naming, comprehension and verbal short-term memory. In conclusion, despite differences in orthography, there are striking similarities in the theoretical constructs of reading-related tasks in Malay and in English.

Acquisition of Malay word recognition skills: lessons from low-progress early readers

“…In contrast, phoneme segmentation was not significantly correlated to word recognition. These data support the view that phonological awareness is an important contributor to Malay word recognition as was previously found by Lee (2008a). In addition, the pattern of correlations suggests that the coarse-grain syllable awareness tasks had a much stronger relationship to word reading than the more fine-grain phoneme awareness tasks.…”

The Malay Lexicon Project: A database of lexical statistics for 9,592 words

“…Rumi has five simple vowels and 20 consonants; x is not used, and q and v are found only in foreign loanwords. There are five digraphs ( gh , kh , ny , ng , and sy ) and three diphthongs ( ai , au , ua ) (see Awang, 2004;Lee, 2008).…”

“…Despite Malay's large user base of about 250 million people (Tadmor, 2009) and its interesting linguistic properties, published experiments on the cognitive processing of Malay are relatively sparse and mostly are concerned with children's spelling (e.g., Jalil & Rickard Liow, 2008;Lee, 2008;Rickard Liow & Lee, 2004;Rickard Liow, Yap, Lee, & Ramos, 2008;Winskel & Widjaja, 2007). One major impediment to the development of research on skilled adult reading, and hence to reliable crosslinguistic comparisons with English, has been the lack of psycholinguistic norms (e.g., word frequency, neighborhood density, length) that are needed to support the design of empirical studies.…”

Listening Comprehension Assessment: Validity Studies of Two Vertically Scaled Tests for Portuguese Students [Evaluación de la Comprensión Oral: Estudios de Validez de Dos Tests con Versiones Escaladas Verticalmente para Alumnos Portugueses]

“…Factorial analysis of the listening comprehension test items that incorporate a battery of standardized tests constructed by the Dutch National Institute for Educational Measurement (Gillijns & Verhoeven, 1992) yielded a single factor. A reading-related assessment battery in Malay (Lee, 2008) that integrates several tests, including a listening comprehension assessment, was also studied through confirmatory factorial analysis.…”