Reducing the Cognitive Complexity in Reading the Arabic Script of Written Malay via Diacritics

Malay, the national language of Malaysia, is written in two distinct scripts: the Arabic script and the Romanised script. The Arabic script of written Malay is relatively more cognitively complex (Salehuddin, 2012); making it today the less preferred script of written Malay in comparison to Romanised script. Salehuddin (2013) proposed the introduction of the Arabic vowel diacritics into the Arabic script of written Malay to reduce its cognitive complexity. Hence, this paper presents results of an experiment using DMDX as a tool to investigate the accuracy of reading Malay words written in Arabic script with and without diacritics.