In timed experimental studies of skilled readers, there is debate about processing differences in alphabetic languages. Berent and Perfetti (1995) propose that the phonological computation of consonants and vowels is performed by two distinct cycles: consonants first, followed by vowels. In English, a language with irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondences, this consonant advantage (shorter response times) can be explained by the fact that the irregularity is mainly due to the vowels, resulting in their slower processing. Colombo (2000), however, found a vowel advantage in Italian. This opposite pattern of results was attributed to the consistent spelling-sound correspondences in Italian and the relatively few number of vowels, compared to consonants, thus facilitating the computation of vowels.

The Malay language is similar to Italian in terms of its consonant-vowel ratio and spelling-sound regularity. We tested whether consonant-vowel processing time does depend on language features by comparing the performance of skilled readers of Malay with skilled readers of English on a position-specific letter search task. With the same set of orthographically legal non-words as stimuli, we found vowels are searched faster than consonants by Malay readers. This finding provides support for Colombo's explanation in terms of specific language features, but further research must separate the influence of language exposure from the reader's propensity to re-code phonologically.