An exploratory study on the handwritten allographic features of multi-ethnic population with different educational backgrounds

PLoS One. 2022 Oct 7;17(10):e0268756. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0268756. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Ethnicity, native and/or foreign language knowledge, as well as the learned writing systems potentially influence the development of an individual's handwriting. The unique education system consisting of National schools, Chinese-medium vernacular schools, Tamil-medium vernacular schools, and Islamic religious schools in Malaysia may have established specific characteristic handwritten allographic features that deserve investigation within the intelligence context. This study was aimed to explore handwritten allographic features of handwriting samples from 120 subjects (30 writers from four different educational backgrounds mentioned above). Characteristic features which could be attributed to the study groups were statistically analyzed and identified. In this study, thirteen allographic features, including letters "A", "B", "D", "H", "p", "T", "t", "w", "X" and "x", were found to be discriminative. Such information could serve to indicate the primary education system undergone by a writer; enabling the comparison of different handwriting profiles and allowing characterization of writers to a specific group of people.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Biometry
  • Ethnicity*
  • Handwriting*
  • Humans
  • India
  • Language

Grants and funding

The authors thank the financial support via the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) from Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (FRGS/1/2018/SS10/USM/02/1, awarded to Ahmad Fahmi Lim bin Abdullah). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.