The importance of Maltese diacritical marks in visual word recognition in the context of online writing

Abstract

The rapid changes in technology have changed the way we live and communicate with one another. Particularly, the internet created a place where people engage in orthographic communication with one another, such as social media and blog posts. However, written material online does not always follow all of the language rules. We asked whether this influenced the way the Maltese language is written and read online. Firstly, we analysed a corpus of comments on Times of Malta’s news portal articles. Our focus was on words which contain at least one diacritic mark in their letters (ċ, ġ, ħ, ż). Approximately 95% of the words had such diacritics omitted. Through simulated data, we observed that higher frequency words tend to have diacritics omitted more frequently. Moreover, commenters were likely to be consistent in their use (or lack thereof) of these unique Maltese letters. Then we tested participants in a masked lexical priming decision task (experiment 1) and found that removing the diacritic mark from the letters ġ or ż within the prime did not affect the task performance. In experiment 2, participants read whole sentences in which diacritic marks were removed from the context, the target, neither or both. We found no reading cost between either of these four conditions. Thus, we concluded that diacritic marks are not an important feature in early visual word processing in Maltese. Theoretically, these findings suggest that repeated exposure to words with missing diacritics leads readers to store these casual forms, which subsequently leads to easy recognition.