MITIGATING THE COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY IN READING THE ARABIC SCRIPT OF MALAY VIA SPELLING REFORMATION

The Arabic Script of Malay (henceforth, Jawi) has been found to be cognitively complex, and this could be a reason why this script is marginalized by a majority of Malay speakers, despite Malay being a digraphic (or biscriptal) language.The preference of the Roman Script (or Latin Script, henceforth Rumi) over Jawi is unacceptable because Rumi is not meant to replace Jawi.In another study, three experiments using the E-Prime Software have shown that Jawi is complex due to the four spelling patterns in the current Jawi spelling system.This paper, hence, proposes a change in the current Jawi spelling system so as to mitigate its complexity.A new Jawi spelling system named EZ-Jawi was designed to achieve this aim.EZ-Jawi is less complex compared to the current Jawi spelling system as the former has a consistent mapping between the Jawi symbols and the Malay speech sound each symbol represents.Instead of using three letters to represent 6 vowel sounds (and the same 3 letters to represent consonant sounds, EZ-Jawi introduces the use of six diacritics to represent all six vowel sounds in Malay.Thirty participants participated in an intervention program in which the EZ-Jawi module was introduced.Following this, they participated in an experiment using the E-Prime Software that is linked to the TOBII TX300 eye tracker, which required them to read 30 Malay words in a) the current Jawi spelling system and b) EZ-Jawi.Results show that the mean number of correct responses in reading EZ-Jawi is significantly higher than the current Jawi spelling system and that the reaction time (onset) to reading is significantly faster in reading EZ-Jawi than the current Jawi spelling system.These findings support our suggestion that a reform in the current Jawi spelling system is necessary so that reading Jawi will no longer be a difficult task, and eventually, Jawi will no longer be marginalized by its speakers.