The Malay Lexicon Project: a database of lexical statistics for 9,592 words.
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.
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, Republic of Singapore. melvin@nus.edu.sg
Melvin J
MJ
Yap
Susan J Rickard
SJ
Liow
Sajlia Binte
SB
Jalil
Siti Syuhada Binte
SS
Faizal
D000328:Adult; D044466:Asian People; D016208:Databases, Factual; D003657:Decision Making; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D014825:Vocabulary