Segmental awareness --- the ability of speakers to consciously manipulate segments of a language --- has implications in various areas ranging from reading pedagogy to theories of phonology. It has been observed that it is quite easy to train a literate speaker of English to perform such tasks as reversing a pair of segments in a word, but it has also been observed that such tasks are much harder for readers of nonalphabetic scripts. The Brahmi-derived scripts of India occupy an important place in this debate since they are segmental in that vowels and consonants are represented with clearly identifiable graphemes, yet the scripts are not linear in the way purely alphabetic scripts are: rather the symbols are arranged in syllablesized units. Previous work has shown that readers of Indian scripts who have not also learned an alphabetic system lack the ability to manipulate segments to the same degree that speakers of English do, yet things are not quite so clearcut: Indian readers seem to be better at performing some segmental manipulation tasks than others, and the differences in performance seem to be related to properties of the script. This study aims to explore this question further with a carefully designed set of experiments that will capitalize on the properties of Indic scripts. Specifically, we intend to investigate readers of five scripts -- Devanagari, Odya, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam --- and test how the differing properties of each script affect similar or identical phoneme manipulation tasks. We will study this both with languages that normally use these scripts (Hindi, Oriya, Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam, respectively) and with Konkani, a minority language without its own script that uses the script of the state language --- Devanagari, Kannada and Malayalam --- in each of the three states it is spoken in. The results of these experiments will be analyzed in terms of a script index that will encode properties of the scripts, including the spatial arrangement of symbols in the scripts, amount of fusion between glyphs, and the phonological """"""""regularity"""""""" of how the script encodes the language.
