TABLE 3.

Psycholinguistic characteristics of the three Asian language versions of the spelling task.

Psycholinguistic characteristics	Chinese	Malay	Tamil
Phonological characteristics
No. of phonemes	1 – 3	3 – 9	4 – 11
Phonologically complex itemsa	70%	10%	60%
Graphemic-orthographic characteristics
No. of graphemes/characters	1	3 − 10	2 – 7
Graphemic complex itemsb	60%	10%	100%
Visual complexityc	19−41	10−14	13−26
Morphological-semantic characteristics
Items with homophones	90%	NA	NA
Morphologically complex itemsd	0%	20%	10%

^aAn item was judged as complex if it contained a dipthong, long vowel, retroflex consonant or consonant cluster and as simple if none of these phonemic units were present. ^bAn item was judged as complex if it contained at least one composed grapheme (digraph, composed character, built up akshara) and was otherwise considered simple. ^cBased on multidimensional measure using GraphCom (Chang et al., 2018). ^dAn item was judged as complex if it contained at least one pre- or suffix or represented a compound word formed of at least two root words and was otherwise considered simple. NA, Not applicable to this writing system.