The design of Malay sentences for measuring reading performance for the Radner-UKM Malay Reading Charts

The Radner Reading Charts for measuring reading performance are available in 11 European languages plus Turkish. There is a need to develop a Malay version, as Malay is spoken by 240 million speakers in Southeast Asia. The study's purpose is to create and validate Malay sentence optotypes comparable in number and length of words, difficulty, and syntactical structure, for constructing the Malay version of the Radner Reading Charts. Forty Malay sentences were constructed following the methods used for the German Radner Reading Charts. We measured reading time (rt), reading speed (rs), and reading errors for 120 participants (mean age = 22.09 ± 1.28 years). Sentences were statistically standardized by selecting those within rt_mean±0.25 × SD and rs_mean±0.25 × SD. Validity was analyzed by comparing the sentences' reading time and reading speed with the 75-word Malay Early Reading Evaluation Text. We selected 24 equally matched sentences, with rs_mean=179.14 ± 4.66 words per minute, rt_mean=4.83 ± 0.13 s, and mean reading errors of 0.13 ± 0.04 words. The Malay sentences and standard text's reading speeds were highly correlated (r = 0.81; p = < 0.001). Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.979. The 24 Malay sentence optotypes are highly comparable, with high validity and reliability, and are incorporated in the Radner-UKM Malay Reading Charts for determining reading acuity and speed for young, visually normal adult Malay speakers.