Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate the processing of inflected verbs in Bengali. The word forms involve an interaction of orthography andphonology: the 1st Person singular is formed from the 3rd Person by adding the suffix /-i/. For stem vowels [, e, , o]this causes the stem vowel to be raised. For [e, o] this is reflected orthographically, but not for [,]. We examine thisin a cross-modal priming study and an eye tracking task where an auditory first-syllable fragment is matched to eitherthe 1st or 3rd Person visual form. We show that orthography plays an important role, with mismatching forms beingless effective as primes, and fragment completion being easier for patterns with different orthography. For words withno orthographic difference, manual responses to fragment completion were at chance, but eye tracking revealed distinctmatch vs. mismatch processing. We discuss implications for roles of orthography and phonology in lexical access.