Scanning in Different Scripts: Does Jawi interfere with Bahasa Malaysia and English?

Abstract

This article reports on two experiments which investigate the array-scanning characteristics of Malaysian subjects when exposed to arrays of Roman and Arabic letters. It examines the search patterns to see if there is any interference between the Roman alphabet and Arabic scripts used to read Bahasa Malaysia. The experiments show that Malaysian subjects produced unique search patterns with both Roman and Arabic letters. These patterns are then related to search patterns found with native English speakers and native Arabic speakers. The article then discusses how these patterns may be related to the underlying linguistic structure of words in Bahasa Malaysia, English and Arabic.The last thirty years of Applied Linguistics and Second Language research have seen a re-awakening of an interest in reading research alongside a movement away from the segmental, basic building blocks of language towards a wider view of language and discourse structure. Whilst such an approach was a healthy departure from the strictures of structuralist linguists, there are still important issues to be investigated in the area of the smallest building blocks of language. One such issue in the area of reading concerns, not the interpretation of discourse structure, but the mechanism by which individual words are recognised.For those concerned with teaching languages within the school setting, and particularly those concerned with teaching children who are learning to read in such radically different scripts as the Roman alphabet and Arabic, such questions of how words are recognised must be of critical importance. Word recognition research in cognitive psychology has long been an important contributor to our understanding of the workings of the brain. A number of powerful techniques and procedures have been developed by psychologists to probe the way that words are perceived. However, until very recently, the mechanisms of word recognition have been studied almost totally with native English speakers. The questions of how words are recognised by speakers of other languages is only just beginning to be considered.