Distinct orthography boosts morphophonological discrimination: Vowel raising in Bengali verb inflections

Abstract

This study is concerned with how vowel alternation, in combination with and without orthographic reflection of the vowel change, affects lexical access and the discrimination of morphologically related forms. Bengali inflected verb forms provide an ideal test case, since present tense verb forms undergo phonologically conditioned, predictable vowel raising. The mid-to-high alternations, but not the low-to-mid ones, are represented in the orthography. This results in three different cases: items with no change (NoDiff), items with a phonological change not represented in the orthography (PronDiff) and items for which both phonology and orthography change (OrthPronDiff).

To determine whether these three cases differ in terms of lexical access and discrimination, we conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 was a cross-modal lexical decision task with auditory primes (1^stperson and 3^rdperson forms, e.g. [lek^he] or [lik^hi]) and visual targets (verbal noun; e.g. [lek^ha]). Experiment 2 uses eye tracking in a fragment completion task, in which auditory fragments (first syllable of 1^st or 3^rdperson form, e.g. [le-] from [lek^he]) were to be matched to one of two visual targets (full 1^st and 3^rdperson forms, [lek^he] vs. [lik^hi] in Bengali script).

While the lexical decision task, a global measure of lexical access, did not show a difference between the cases, the eye-tracking experiment revealed effects of both phonology and orthography. Discrimination accuracy in the OrthPronDiff condition (vowel alternation represented in the orthography) was high. In the PronDiff condition, where phonologically differing forms are represented by the same graphemes, manual responses were at chance, although eye movements revealed that match and non-match were discriminated. Thus, our results indicate that phonological alternations which are not represented in spelling are difficult to process, whereas having orthographically distinct forms boosts discrimination performance, implying orthographically influenced mental phonological representations.

1. Introduction

In speech processing, listeners match the auditory information in the signal to a stored representation (phonological form) in their lexicon. However, in many cases, the phonological information extracted from the signal is not an exact match for the phonological form of the stored representation. Nevertheless, alternating vowels in pairs such as mean [miːn]/meant [mɛnt] and sane [seɪn]/sanity [sænɪti] activate the same lexical entry of their underlying base, despite the differences in vowel (Kiparsky, 1982). In English, these alternations are restricted to certain suffixes. However, vowel alternations are a wide-spread phenomenon occurring in verb paradigms across languages, not just within irregular but also within regular verbs (e.g. German strong verbs, e.g. treffe [tʁɛfə] ‘meet-1p.sg’~ triffst [tʁɪfst] ‘meet-2p.sg’) as well as other syntactic categories (e.g. English derivation, serene ~ serenity; see Fowler, Napps, & Feldman, 1985; Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994). In addition to the phonological processes involved in recognising such a form (i.e. activating the relevant representation in the lexicon, but also discriminating it from grammatically similar forms), orthography adds another dimension. Since inflected forms are often the outcome of a diachronic process where spelling reflects pronunciation in an earlier form of the language, orthography can be unsystematic. For instance, in Dutch the vowel length difference between dag [dax] ‘day-sg’ ~ dagen [da:ɣen] ‘day-pl’ is not reflected in the writing, nor is the difference between English read [ri:d] ‘read-pres’ and read [rɛd] ‘read-past’, whereas the phonologically similar difference lead [li:d] ‘lead-pres’ ~ led [lɛd] ‘lead-past’ does involve a change in spelling. Do vowel changes, as well as the orthographic complexities, make resolving the form more difficult than if the vowel remains the same as in the base form? If there is no cost resulting from the discrepancy between surface form and lexical representation, such alternations could offer a processing advantage as the disambiguation of distinct forms could begin earlier – as soon as the stem vowel is encountered, rather than on hearing the suffix (cf. Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson, 1991). The roles of phonology and orthography in resolving spoken morphological forms has not yet been investigated systematically. One possibility is that orthographic representations are activated immediately when processing speech, and therefore differential spelling may imply more distinct mental activation patterns (e.g. Frost & Ziegler, 2007). Here we assume phonological information is used as soon as it is decoded, i.e. the lexical representation will be activated as soon as possible. The lexical representation consists of the phonological and orthographic forms of the stem and information of all possible affixes and their phonological exponents as well as semantic and syntactic information (see Plank & Lahiri, 2015, for detail regarding the phonological representation). Mapping the incoming auditory or orthographic pattern of any one of these morphological forms to this representation, regardless of whether there is a complete match between input and stored information, constitutes lexical access. What we investigate here is the effect of stem vowel alternations and their representation in the orthography on the difficulty and speed of this process.

The English examples we used above stem from irregular past tense forms, which have been discussed extensively in the English past tense debate (e.g. Clahsen, Eisenbeiss, & Sonnenstuhl-Henning, 1997; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1998; McClelland & Patterson, 2002; Pinker, 1991). Most investigations into the processing of regulars vs. irregulars fall short of explaining the role of either phonology or orthography per se due to a focus on dual vs. single route models to handle systematic vs. idiosyncratic changes and therefore do not address the interacting roles of phonology and orthography. Crepaldi, Rastle, Coltheart, and Nickels (2010), however, reported successful priming with irregular past tense forms in a masked priming experiment (i.e. with visually presented primes), in line with findings reported by Meunier and Marslen-Wilson (2004) for French inflections (but see Kielar, Joanisse, & Hare, 2008; for conflicting results; and cf. Pastizzo & Feldman, 2002, who report a lack of priming in forms such as taught ~ teach which they attribute to a lack of orthographic overlap).

Importantly, however, vowel alternations occur in regular contexts across many languages, and experiments addressing irregulars cannot answer the question of how such predictable processes are dealt with. Testing the relative contribution of phonology and orthography systematically is even more challenging as it is difficult to find a large enough set of words which behave completely systematically with regard to both aspects.

Here, we use verb inflection in Bengali to approach this question, where a highly regular process of vowel raising which leads to phonological alternations, and a systematic difference in whether or not these vowel changes are represented in the orthography coincide. In other words, Bengali presents the ideal test case for the interacting roles of phonology and orthography in the resolution of inflected forms. The Bengali verb paradigm used in this study provides three distinct categories of pairs of stem and affixed items: those without a phonological change which are entirely transparent (phonology matches orthography), those which only differ phonologically (with identical orthography) and those which differ phonologically for which this difference is encoded in the writing. This provides the perfect opportunity to investigate the relative contribution of phonology and orthography to the process of resolving an auditory form that is not identical to its stored lexical representation – a combination of factors that are elsewhere hard to find.

Across languages, verb inflection uses forms that differ with respect to the phonology of the stem (e.g. get [gεt] ~ got[gɔt]), that involve the addition of an affix (e.g. pack [pæk] ~ pack-ed [pæk-t]), or both (e.g. keep [kiːp] ~ kep-t [kɛp-t]), as well as more irregular forms. The inflected forms we investigate in this paper are Bengali present tense forms. Here, suffixes [‐i] and [‐e] are used to produce the 1^st and 3^rd person singular, respectively, and adding the [‐i] suffix involves raising the stem vowel by one step for most forms (i.e. a regressive assimilation process that adjusts the stem vowel height towards that of the suffix). An example is [lek^h-e] ‘write-3p.pres’³ with its 1^st person form [lik^h-i] ‘write-1p.pres’, in which the base vowel [e] in [lek^h-] is raised to [i] (i.e. the vowel height is increased by one step) because the suffix [‐i] follows. Corresponding processes occur for base vowels [o] (raised to [u]), [æ] (raised to [e]) and [ɔ] (raised to [o]). This results in a paradigm where there are changes to the stem vowel which are governed by phonology and are entirely predictable. The phenomenon under investigation here concerns all monosyllabic verbs in Bengali, except those with stem vowel [a], which is not raised. Such stem vowel changes due to regressive vowel raising are a common occurrence across languages where a high vowel affix (e.g. [‐i]) results in a step-wise raising of the stem vowel (e.g., German geb-en [geb-ən] ‘give-inf’ ~ gib-st [gib-st]‘give-2p.sg’, where gibst is derived via vowel raising from Old High German geb-ist > gib-ist; Hock, 1991, p. 212). This phenomenon is especially common diachronically but also well-attested synchronically, and these sound changes are not always represented orthographically (see above).

In the past (Middle Bengali, 1200–1800; Chatterji, 1926/1978), step-wise raising of the stem vowel (low-to-mid, mid-to-high) in the context of high vowel suffixes ([‐i, ‐u]), was an entirely transparent process. Vowels changed in height, while the place of articulation remained the same: [æ, ɔ] became [e, o] and in turn [e, o] became [i, u]. The formal writing system (Bengali [ʃud̪^hːo b^hɑʃɑ] ‘pure language’), however, in some cases still reflects the older stage of the language (i.e. does not use different graphemes for the raised vowels). In Modern Bengali, there is a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters for the high vowels [i] and [u] and the low vowel [a] is also entirely transparent. By contrast, the low vowels [æ] and [ɔ] differ in terms of their sound-letter correspondence. Thus, Modern Bengali has a system where entirely regular phonological alternations in the verb paradigm differ in terms of the degree to which these changes are represented orthographically: [] ~ [] ‘write-3p/1p’ ~ (distinct spelling of the stem vowel) vs. [] ~ [] ‘play-3p/1p’ ~ (identical spelling of the stem vowel, despite a change in pronunciation).⁴ The details of these alternations are given in Fig. 1. Consequently, the recognition of these inflected forms may be affected by multiple, possibly interacting, cues.

Fig. 1.

Examples and explanation of the vowel alternations in 1p and 3p Bengali present tense verbs.

While Bengali provides an ideal test case for the interaction of phonological and orthographic information, the phenomenon of vowel alternations is, as outlined above, common across languages and thus the findings presented here are more widely applicable. In the present paper, we approach the question of how listeners identify these inflected forms using two priming paradigms (cross-modal lexical decision in Experiment 1, and fragment completion with eye tracking in Experiment 2) with auditory primes. As there is no previous research on the processing of inflected forms with vowel raising, and very little on the interaction of phonological and orthographic information in the processing of inflection, we draw on the literature on orthographic activation in auditory processing, as well as relevant studies of the processing of morphophonological alternations, to provide the background for our investigation. We focus in particular on the activation of orthographic representations when hearing a word, and mechanisms involved in this process.

1.1. Orthographic activation in auditory processing

Psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic investigations, starting with Seidenberg and Tanenhaus' seminal work (Seidenberg & Tanenhaus, 1979), provide convincing evidence for the mutual activation of orthography and phonology in language processing. Using a number of different methods and paradigms, studies show that orthographic information is activated during spoken word processing (Cutler & Davis, 2012; Seidenberg & Tanenhaus, 1979; Taft, 2011; Taft, Castles, Davis, Lazendic, & Nguyen-Hoan, 2008; Tanenhaus, Flanigan, & Seidenberg, 1980). While this cross-modality activation seems well established, the precise mechanisms remain under debate. Many accounts point towards this process being automatic (cf. Taft, 2011, for a review), including studies investigating the automaticity of orthographic activation using orthographic congruency effects in priming (e.g. testing whether dream-gleam leads to stronger priming than scheme-gleam, Chéreau, Gaskell, & Dumay, 2007; but see Pattamadilok, Kolinsky, Ventura, Radeau, & Morais, 2007 for contrasting results). However, whether the locus of the effect is at the lexical or sublexical level is an unresolved question, because experimental techniques that reveal an orthographic consistency effect with existing words (e.g. Pattamadilok, Morais, Ventura, & Kolinsky, 2007; Perre, Pattamadilok, Montant, & Ziegler, 2009; Ventura, Morais, Pattamadilok, & Kolinsky, 2004; Ziegler & Ferrand, 1998; Ziegler, Petrova, & Ferrand, 2008) have sometimes extended to pseudowords (Pattamadilok, Morais, et al., 2007) and sometimes not (Ventura et al., 2004; Ziegler & Ferrand, 1998). Here, the question is whether words with rimes that are associated with a single spelling (e.g. sling) lead to faster lexical decision compared to words with rimes that could be spelled multiple ways (e.g. brief, whose rime could also be spelled <-eef> or <-eaf>).

Taft (2011) illustrates how previous findings can all be explained by an Interactive Activation-style model (Taft, 1991) which adds an orthographic component to the TRACE model (McClelland & Elman, 1986). However, most previous experimental results are also compatible with the theory that phonological representations themselves are modified as orthography is acquired. In this account, hearing a word does not necessarily activate a separate orthographic level of representation but the activated phonological representation is different from one in an illiterate listener. This theory is supported by Perre et al. (2009) who suggest that their ERP results on the consistency effect indicate an involvement of areas associated with phonology, and not of areas such as the Visual Word Form Area (see below). Of relevance for the present work is particularly the automaticity of orthographic activation for existing lexical items: we can assume that perceiving an auditorily presented prime word or prime fragment will not just activate the lexcial entry itself, but also an orthographic representation.

Further evidence comes from fMRI studies investigating how learning to read changes the brain; both in the context of comparing illiterate and literate adults and children before and after beginning to read. One area of interest here is the Planum Temporale (PT), which represents phonemic categories (Chang et al., 2010; Mesgarani, Cheung, Johnson, & Chang, 2014) and was shown to be much more active in literates compared to illiterates while listening to speech (Dehaene et al., 2010). PT activation is also correlated with tasks relating to phonemic awareness. A second area under investigation is the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA; Dehaene et al., 2010; Dehaene & Cohen, 2011). While this area is generally understood to be inactive during listening (e.g. passive sentence comprehension), Dehaene et al. (2010) found activation of the VWFA during auditory lexical decision tasks. They proposed that the VWFA may be particularly involved where the orthographic code needs to be activated in order to make a difficult decision, such as lexical decision or rhyming – in particular in the presence of a spelling conflict (e.g. pint/mint). Dehaene et al. (2010, 2015) interpret this as top-down activation of the orthographic form.

1.2. Effects of morphophonological alternations on lexical access

While no studies to date have specifically addressed the effect of orthography in the processing of regular inflectional paradigms, there has been research on whether morphophonological alternations cause delays in lexical access. One such example uses vowel alternations in German morphologically complex forms between back and front vowels in words such as Stock ‘stick-sg’ ~ Stöck-e. ‘stick-pl’. Scharinger, Lahiri, and Eulitz (2010) investigated the processing of such forms in contrast to non-alternating Stoff ‘fabric-sg’ ~ Stoff-e ‘fabric-pl’ using EEG, finding stronger mismatch negativity if the non-alternating base form (Stoff) was preceded by a stem exhibiting the fronted vowel. Phonological alternations, however, need not impede processing. In behavioural studies on derivational morphology equal facilitation has been observed for derivations with phonological alternations and those with phonological and orthographic changes (e.g. Fowler et al., 1985; Stanners, Neiser, Hernon, & Hall, 1979). Marslen-Wilson et al. (1994) investigated derivational morphology in a series of cross-modal lexical decision tasks and concluded that phonological alternation of suffixed items (e.g. elusive ~ elude or serenity ~ serene) had no detrimental effects on the facilitation of the base item as long as they were equally semantically transparent. Thus, for instance, van-ity [væn-ɪti] primes vain [veɪn] just as well as happiness [hæpi-nəs] primes happy [hæpi].

Lahiri and Reetz (2010) examined a morphophonological vowel alternation similar to that in the present study using German singular and plural nouns. The stem vowel in German singular nouns with rounded back vowels changes to an umlauted vowel in the plural (e.g. Sohn [zoːn] ‘son-sg’ ~ Söhne [zøːne] ‘son-pl’) with only very few exceptions (e.g. Boot [boːt] ‘boat-sg’ ~ Boote [boːte] ‘boat-pl’) where this is not the case. In an auditory delayed priming task (with several items intervening between prime and target), they used the plural forms (e.g. [zøːne] and [boːte]) to prime singular targets (e.g. [zoːn] and [boːt]) to determine whether the plurals with the umlauted base vowel resulted in a difference in the degree of activation of the singular target compared to those cases where no umlauting took place. Their results show no difference in the degree of priming between the two conditions and they thus conclude that the plurals showing the vowel alternation are equally effective at activating the lexical entry as those which do not, regardless of the difference in the surface forms.

Previous research on the processing of morphologically related regularly inflected words has shown that the base is always activated when an inflected form is encountered and that inflection priming seems to generate stronger facilitation than derivational priming (see Amenta & Crepaldi, 2012 and Leminen, Smolka, Duñabeitia, & Pliatsikas, 2019 for reviews). Research on verb paradigms has focused on the discussion of possible differences in representation and access between regular and irregular forms (e.g. Clahsen et al., 1997; Marcus, Brinkmann, Clahsen, Wiese, & Pinker, 1995; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1998; McClelland & Patterson, 2002; Pinker, 1991) with some accounts proposing a difference in terms of storage and therefore access. According to those models, while irregular items are claimed to be stored as separate lexical entries, for regular inflection the base is stored and the inflected forms are decomposed or constructed rather than stored and retrieved independently. Connectionist models, by contrast, propose a single-mechanism framework for both types of word forms (McClelland & Patterson, 2002). Several studies focused specifically on the question whether irregular inflections prime the corresponding base form. Meunier and Marslen-Wilson (2004) used regular and irregular French inflections, some of which included vowel alternations (e.g. regular: aimerons [ɛmrõ] vs. aimons [ɛmõ] to prime the target aimer [ɛme:] and irregular with vowel change: levont [ləvõ] vs. lèvent [lɛv] to prime the target lever [ləve:]) Their results indicated equal amounts of priming for both the regular and irregular forms, both in cross-modal repetition priming and masked priming, which eliminates semantic effects. For English, Pastizzo and Feldman (2002) reported priming effects in visual masked priming with past tense forms involving only a vowel change (fell ~ fall), but no corresponding effects for forms such as taught ~ teach. This was attributed to the lack of orthographic overlap. However, Crepaldi et al. (2010) showed that consistent priming effects emerge once the orthographic overlap calculation is not based on a purely slot-based metric but uses spatial coding, where grapheme identity is weighted more heavily compared to position within a string (Davis & Bowers, 2006). Similar to Pastizzo and Feldman (2002), Crepaldi et al. (2010) compared orthographically and morphologically related primes (fell ~ fall) against (a) orthographically but not morphologically related primes (full ~ fall) and (b) neither orthographically nor morphologically related primes (hope ~ fall). Importantly, however, orthographical overlap was calculated using both left-aligned slot coding (McClelland & Elman, 1986) and spatial coding (Davis & Bowers, 2006), eliminating the shortcomings of Pastizzo and Feldman's (2002) method of accounting for orthographic overlap.

Studies on irregular inflection paradigms aside, the transparency of the phonological form and the interaction of phonology and orthography have not yet been thoroughly investigated. The verb paradigm we investigate in this paper is entirely regular and the phonological alternations described above are fully predictable. Therefore, as the lexical entry is activated, listeners can draw on a phonological rule which is entirely consistent across verbs. We assume all inflected forms will activate one lexical representation, that of the stem, and our investigation is thus focused on the more fine-grained differences across different groups of words, as well as on the time course of processing. As we shall see, while a lexical decision paradigm is not sensitive enough to distinguish between words with different degrees of orthographic and phonological change, the time course of eye movements during discrimination of similar forms (rather than just lexical access) provides deeper insight into the processes involved.

1.3. The present study

The current paper investigates the relationship between phonology and orthography from a different angle compared to previous work. In the present work, stimuli are inflected verb forms of the same stem which are subject to a particular type of vowel alternation: raising the vowel one step in the context of a high vowel suffix [‐i, ‐u] in Bengali verb paradigms. In this paper, we restrict ourselves to Standard Colloquial Bengali as spoken in Kolkata, India (Chatterji, 1926/1978). In Bengali, person marking in the present tense is indicated by a final vowel: [‐i] for 1^st person ([k^hel-i] ‘play-1p.pres’) and [-e] for 3^rd person ([k^hæl-e] ‘play-3p.pres’). The citation form of verbs (verbal noun) ends with [-a] ([k^hæl-a] ‘play-vn’)⁵. Certain combinations of vowels trigger vowel raising. The high vowel [‐i] of the 1^st person suffix will trigger the stem vowels [æ, e, ɔ, o] to raise to [e, i, o, u], while the 3^rd person suffix [-e] does not have any effect. In addition, the stem alternations [e ~ i] and [o ~ u] are reflected in orthography while [æ ~ e] and [ɔ ~ o] are not. In this study, we investigate three groups of verbs with stem vowels [a, æ, ɔ, e, o] (see Fig. 1 for examples):

• •NoDiff: low [a] does not change; no difference in phonology or orthography
• •PronDiff: low [æ] and [ɔ] are raised to mid [e] and [o]; difference only in phonology which is not reflected in the orthography
• •OrthPronDiff: mid [e] and [o] are raised to [i] and [u] respectively; difference in both phonology and orthography

Verbs in the NoDiff condition are entirely transparent due to the lack of change in the stem vowel [a] and the changes in the OrthPronDiff condition are equally unambiguous as the vowel alternation is reliably represented in the orthography of these items in both front and back vowels. In the alternation of the back vowels [o]-[u] with the root vowel [o], both forms are transparent in their letter-sound correspondences and both vowels are explicitly marked (e.g. [] vs. [] for [motʃ^h-a] ‘wipe-vn’). In the cases of [e]-[i] alternation with the root vowel [e], both forms have their respective digraphs matching the pronunciation (e.g. [] vs. [] in [lek^h-a] ‘write-vn’).

Where the PronDiff condition is concerned, however, the relationship between phonology and orthography is less transparent and differs between front and back vowels. In the alternation of the front vowels [æ]-[e] with the root vowel [æ], the vowel [æ] in the 3^rd person is written with the same digraph as that for [e]. Thus [] and [] are both represented orthographically by the digraph for the verb [k^hæl-a] ‘play-vn’. Note that this involves the same grapheme used to represent [e] in the [e]-[i] alternation above. The representation of the alternation of the back vowels [ɔ]-[o] with the root vowel [ɔ] is complicated by the fact that the vowel [ɔ] has no independent grapheme in Bengali. Thus, the bare consonant indicates the vowel [ɔ]. Within this paradigm, the pronunciation of the raised vowel [o] is not reflected in writing, unlike in the [o]-[u] alternation above, and thus both [kɔ] and [ko] are represented only by the grapheme for [k] as in [kɔr-a] ‘do-vn’. Consequently, while in neither case the changes are represented orthographically, in the [æ]-[e] paradigm, the written vowel is the one for [e] while in [ɔ]-[o] there is no overt digraph, which is usually interpreted as [ɔ].

This pattern results in different degrees of transparency in terms of (a) the correspondence between sounds and letters and (b) between sounds and base form. With regard to the question of whether the first syllable vowel predicts the suffix (and hence the person attribute of the word in question), this may result in ambiguity. If [i] or [u] are heard in the context of this verb paradigm, both are an unambiguous indicator of a 1^st person form from the OrthPronDiff group and both vowels are transparently represented in writing. [æ] and [ɔ] must be a base form from the PronDiff group, but will not come with distinct orthography. In the case of [a], [e] and [o] the phonology does not indicate unambiguously whether this will become a first or third person form or verbal noun. As the low vowel [a] does not change, it occurs in all forms of the verb. It is therefore at least clear that the verb in question belongs to the NoDiff group (although the person attribute can only be resolved once the suffix is perceived). The vowels [e] and [o], however, can either be the base vowel (3^rd person or vn), i.e. the verb belongs to the OrthPronDiff group, or they could be the result of raising from [æ] and [ɔ], i.e. the verb belongs to the PronDiff group. Thus, in addition to the opacity in the sound-letter correspondence, these vowels are also ambiguous in their indication of the paradigm.

We assume that recognising a word form completely after hearing auditory input involves the activation of a lexical representation which consists of the stem and information of all possible morphological affixes and their phonological exponents (e.g. all inflectional forms of the verb and the phonological alternations in stem vowels in our case).

Using a cross-modal lexical decision task and a fragment-completion eye-tracking study, we ask three central questions:

• (a)Does the difference in stem vowel resulting from vowel raising affect access to the mental representation?
• (b)Does reflection of the difference in the orthography affect access to the mental representation?
• (c)Is the ability of the stem vowel to uniquely predict the suffix (or not) the factor that drives the speed of form discrimination (Exp. 2)?

We first present a primed lexical decision task, where the auditory primes are either 1^st or 3^rd person forms and the visual targets are the verbal noun (base form; see Table 1). The aim is to establish whether forms that differ in terms of the stem vowel, or in terms of the stem vowel and spelling, are less effective at priming the corresponding targets, i.e. whether these forms take longer to activate the lexical entry, and whether differences emerge for 1^st vs. 3^rd person primes. This study employs a cross-modal paradigm to avoid effects based on auditory or visual memory traces as well as to allow immediate presentation of the target at the offset of the auditory prime to minimise effects of strategic processing (e.g. McQueen & Sereno, 2005). We expect facilitation of the word/non-word decision in all conditions since primes are always semantically identical and semantic priming effects have been shown to cause the greatest priming effects, especially when the inter-stimulus-interval (ISI) is short (e.g. Bentin & Feldman, 1990). A control condition with unrelated primes is therefore not necessary and was not included in this design. As the 3^rd person shares the stem vowel with the verbal noun (target), there is a greater degree of overlap between these two forms across all three word groups and the facilitation effect of overlap in semantics, morphology and form may be additive. We assume the underlying cause of this facilitation to be a result of repeated automatic activation of the same pre-lexical representation (see McQueen & Sereno, 2005). All primes will activate the same prelexical representation shared by the verbal noun and thus result in faster access. However, if the difference between the stem vowel in the 1^st person primes and their targets affects the ease of access to the lexical entry for the stem, 3^rd person primes may show greater facilitation of the verbal noun target than 1^st person primes in both the PronDiff and OrthPronDiff conditions since the 3^rd person primes' first segment is identical to that of the target. In addition, if the difference in orthographic representation of the vowel alternation plays a role in processing, we would expect to see a difference between the OrthPronDiff condition and the PronDiff condition as greater overlap may result in faster access and therefore a greater amount of pre-activation of the verbal noun target. Should the vowel alternation alone not affect access, this may even lead to no difference emerging between 1^st person and 3^rd person in the PronDiff condition. In the NoDiff condition, no difference in the facilitation resulting from the two primes is expected because the stem vowels are identical. While this primed lexical decision task is a standard way of assessing lexical access, one caveat is that differences between the primes may in this case not be sufficiently strong to attenuate or amplify the semantic priming effect that should arise in all cases, since each prime and target pair is semantically identical in all three conditions. In addition, the 3^rd person is frequently considered a default form (e.g. Kiparsky & Tonhauser, 2013, p. 2077; Bybee, 2001; Lahiri, 1982) which may also lead to faster activation of the stem after 3^rd person primes across all conditions that could override any effect of condition as this access route may be more deeply entrenched.

Table 1.

Example stimuli for Experiment 1.

Condition	NoDiff low vowel/a/		PronDiff low-to-mid		OrthPronDiff mid-to-high
	3P	1P	3P	1P	3P	1P
Prime	mar-e	mar-i	khæl-e	khel-i	lekh-e	likh-i
Target	mar-a		khæl-a		lekh-a
	‘hit-vn’		‘play-vn’		‘write-vn’

In order to investigate the precise time course of processing in the different conditions, we set up a second experiment, this time using eye tracking. By contrast to the priming task, the eye tracking experiment (Exp 2) required subjects to make an active decision between two potential forms. In other words, in addition to lexical activation a precise analysis of the morphological form is required. In a cross-modal fragment completion task, subjects were presented with a first-syllable fragment of either a 1^st person or a 3^rd person form in the NoDiff, PronDiff or OrthPronDiff condition. Presentation of the auditory fragment (e.g. [k^hæ-] from [k^hæle]) was immediately followed by a visual display showing the full orthographic forms of both 1^st and 3^rd person of the same verb (e.g. [k^heli] and [k^hæle]). Subjects were instructed to press a button corresponding to the match, and their eye movements were tracked for a two-second window. Since this task requires precise discrimination between 1^st and 3^rd person, we hypothesized that eye movements would provide fine-grained insight into the time course of the matching process. Using growth-curve analysis (Mirman, 2014) we can construct a detailed model capturing the time course of looking across the trial. This involves fitting polynomials to the curve shapes corresponding to the likelihood of participants looking at a target on the screen, here, the word (1^st person form or 3^rd person form) which they first fixate. Depending on whether subjects perceive this word as a match for the auditory input they heard, or not, they will linger on this item or move away towards the remaining item. In particular the comparison of looking patterns on trials where subjects encounter the matching item first with those on trials where the non-matching item is encountered first, allows us to determine whether (and at what point in time) participants discriminate between the two forms: if the curves are identical, subjects are not able to discriminate between the forms; if the curves diverge (lingering on the match, moving away from the non-match), then subjects are able to discriminate. In addition, as we shall see, the detailed eye movement patterns do not just provide a binary answer to the discrimination question, but also provide insight into the relative difficulty of the decision.

2. Experiment 1

We conducted a cross-modal lexical decision task (with auditory primes and visual targets) to investigate whether there is a difference between the degree of facilitation of a verbal noun target after 1^st vs. 3^rd person primes depending on the degree of overlap of prime and target in both phonological and orthographic information. When the listener hears the prime, the lexical entry is activated, including its orthography, and matched to that of the target. This match can either be a complete match or a partial match with varying degrees of phonological and orthographic overlap, which may result in different patterns of facilitation.

2.1. Methods and design

2.1.1. Participants

Thirty-four native Bengali speakers took part in the study (average age: 19.2 years) and all had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and did not report any language disorders such as dyslexia or any hearing deficits. Participants were students at Satyapriya Roy College of Education, Kolkata (India) where the experiment was conducted.

2.1.2. Stimuli and design

Targets were always the verbal noun (with the suffix [-a]) of a particular verb (presented visually) while the primes were either the 1^st or 3^rd person singular present tense verb (presented auditorily). As outlined above, there are three different possibilities for the phonological and orthographic relationship between primes and targets due to a regressive vowel raising rule and the orthographic representation, which led to the three experimental conditions (cf. Table 1 for examples and Appendix A/Table 5, Table 6 and Table 7 for full stimulus lists).

Stimuli were divided into two lists to allow for priming with either the 1^st person or 3^rd person inflected form while ensuring each participant was only exposed to any given target once throughout the experiment. The number of first and third person verbs in each condition was counterbalanced across the two lists. Trials were pseudo-randomized within each list and care was taken to avoid the repetition of the same condition in adjacent trials. Each of the three conditions consisted of 24 verbal nouns paired once with the 1^st and once with the 3^rd person prime. In addition, three sets of 24 non-word targets with real word primes were constructed using the same pattern of verbal noun targets and inflected primes. Primes for non-word targets were real-word 1^st person or 3^rd person forms and non-word targets were constructed to show overlap with the corresponding prime and to end in the verbal noun suffix -a (e.g. primes /ʤal-i/ ‘burn-1p.pres’ or /ʤal-e/ ‘play-3p.pres’ for target */ʤad-a/).

The inter-stimulus-interval between prime and target was 0 ms meaning the visual target was presented at the offset of the auditory prime. The targets were presented for 1000 ms followed by an inter-trial-interval of 1500 ms when a bleep indicated the start of the next trial.

2.1.3. Procedure

The experiment was conducted in a quiet and darkened room at Satyapriya Roy College of Education in Kolkata, India. Participants were tested in groups of sixteen. Targets were projected onto a screen and auditory primes were played through individual closed-ear headphones (SONY MDR110 LP). Each subject responded to the visual stimuli via individual custom-made two-button boxes. Participants used their dominant hand to indicate a ‘yes’ response. Response data and reaction times were collected with custom-made experimental hardware and software (Reetz & Kleinmann, 2003).

Before each session participants were instructed (verbally) to respond to visual items as quickly and accurately as possible and to not respond to or pay any particular attention to what they hear (auditory primes). Following the instructions, participants were given the opportunity to ask questions and written consent was obtained. After this a ten-item practice task was presented to familiarise subjects with the experiment and this task was immediately scored and repeated until the experimenters were satisfied that all participants had understood the task correctly. Once all subjects were comfortable with the task, the main experiment was run in two blocks of approximately twelve minutes with a short break in between. Smaller breaks, indicated by a countdown from five to one on the screen, were built into each block after every 16 items.

2.2. Results

2.2.1. Data cleaning procedure

All subjects and targets with error rates greater than 30% were excluded from the analysis (one subject (3.30% of total trials) and eight targets (2.57%) removed). Thirty-three subjects remain for the final analysis. All reaction times (RT) outside +/− 2 standard deviations of the individual subject mean were also excluded (2.02%). Reaction time data was log transformed based on a Box-Cox transformation (Box & Cox 1964; −0.1010) and visual inspection of Q-Q plots and histograms.

2.2.2. Reaction time analysis

We performed a linear mixed model analysis in R (using the lme4 package; Bates, Maechler, Bolker, & Walker, 2015) with Condition and Person (1^st person or 3^rd person prime) as fixed effects and Target and Subject as random factors (see Table 2 for mean RTs). A model with random intercepts only⁶ provided the best fit, as the additions of random slopes either resulted in models which did not converge or produced indicators of overfitting. In addition, model fit and distribution of residuals were visually inspected using Q-Q plots and histograms. The results show no overall effect of Condition (χ²(4) = 4.444, p = .349) or of the interaction Condition x Person (χ²(2) = 0.8816, p = .644) while there is a significant effect of Person (χ²(3) = 8.7342, p = .033) indicating faster response latencies after 3^rd person primes than 1^st person primes. As there is no significant interaction, the differences in the degree of overlap do not seem to directly affect reaction times.

Table 2.

Experiment 1 results for RT (in ms) and errors (in %).

Condition	RT (ms)		Errors (%)
	3rdP	1stP	3rdP	1stP
NoDiff	591	599	4.88	5.32
PronDiff	603	616	4.99	6.78
PronOrthDiff	610	625	5.15	6.13

2.2.3. Error analysis

The data shows very low error rates across all conditions (cf. Table 2) and was analysed in R using a binomial logistic regression⁷ with Condition and Person as fixed factors and error as the dependent variable. The analysis shows that neither the addition of Person (χ²(1) = 1.139, p = .286) nor that of Condition (χ²(2) = 0.464, p = .793) significantly improves model fit, and the interaction of Person x Condition (χ²(2) = 0.268, p = .875) did not reach significance either. Thus, no further investigations of differences between conditions were carried out.

2.3. Discussion

The analyses show a main effect of Person (1^st person vs. 3^rd person) but no effect of Condition and no statistically significant interaction. Thus, it seems that, while overall 3^rd person primes generate faster responses to the target, this pattern is not affected by the degrees of difference in phonological and orthographic representation but is likely either an effect of the greater shared material between the 3^rd person primes and their targets as the stem of the 3^rd person prime is identical to that of the verbal noun target or of the greater frequency of use of the 3^rd person form or, indeed, a combination of those factors. As semantic information has been shown to play a very prominent role in cross-modal lexical decision tasks (e.g. Amenta & Crepaldi, 2012; Marslen-Wilson et al., 1994), these results are not altogether surprising and it seems that, if there is a difference to be found, a different methodological approach is necessary.

3. Experiment 2

In Experiment 2 we approached the question of lexical access with cross-modal fragment completion. The aim was to obtain more precise information about the time course of word recognition across the different conditions. Eye tracking was therefore used in order to gain fine-grained insight into mental processes. This task involved listening to a first-syllable fragment and choosing the matching visual word form (entire word in Bengali script) from two alternatives. First-syllable fragments stemmed from the 1^st person or 3^rd person form, and both of these forms were presented visually as potential targets (match and non-match). Participants were asked to respond by pressing a button, and their eye movements were tracked throughout the trial. The idea here is that rather than being a potential hindrance due to a mismatch between auditory form and citation form the vowel alternation could provide an advantage because the upcoming suffix may be predictable on the basis of just the first syllable fragment. The question is whether listeners can utilise this information, and if so whether a representation of the stem vowel change in orthography matters. Our prediction of the processes involved is as follows: Upon hearing the first syllable fragment, the listener needs to activate a lexical entry, which will retrieve paradigm information, i.e. in particular different sets of morphological features together with their phonological realisation. The best match for the auditory fragment is selected, thereby determining the morphological form. We hypothesized further that due to the experience with alternating stem vowels in the OrthPronDiff condition being realised with distinct graphemes, and alternating stem vowels in the PronDiff condition being realised with identical graphemes, the process of lexical activation and morphological resolution would be easier, or faster, for the OrthPronDiff condition.

The rationale for our eye tracking study was that the time course of eye movement patterns would reveal the difficulty of deciding between the two competing forms, and thereby the speed of fragment completion or full morphological resolution. In particular the time course of looking incorporates the time participants take to inspect each item they encounter in turn (match or non-match).

For the NoDiff condition the task is undecidable by definition: both visual items are potential matches for the fragment, since the stem vowel in this condition does not change (note that for the purpose of the analysis one target item was still designated the nominal “match”). Any differences we observe here between different trials should stem from biased responding to 1^st vs. 3^rd person.

For the PronDiff and OrthPronDiff conditions, by contrast, the task ought to be decidable. Depending on whether orthography plays a role we may expect differences between these conditions. In the PronDiff condition, the stem vowels in both target forms are represented by the same graphemes, so an orthographic representation activated upon hearing the first syllable cannot aid discrimination. In the OrthPronDiff condition, however, such an orthographic representation could make discrimination easier as overall activation patterns should be more distinct between a 1^st and 3^rd person form.

Fragment completion further essentially involves the prediction of the suffix of the word. Let us consider exactly how listeners could do this in the PronDiff and OrthPronDiff conditions. The full lexical form could be accessed as we predicted above, by activating a lexical item, which retrieves paradigm information, i.e. activates a set of corresponding morphological forms, one of which will match best, or alternatively by using just the stem vowel to predict the suffix vowel. Due to the step-wise raising system, mid stem vowels [e], [o] can occur both in a base form and in a raised form, and therefore on their own do not predict the suffix unambiguously, whereas low ([æ] or [ɔ]) and high ([i] and [u]) vowels only occur either in a base or in a raised form and therefore predict the suffix unambiguously (low vowels must be followed by [-e], i.e. the 3p suffix, high vowels must be followed by [‐i], the 1p suffix), see Table 3.

Table 3.

Stem vowels and possible morphological forms.

Stem vowel	Candidate morphological form(s)
[i]	1P (OrthPronDiff)
[u]	1P (OrthPronDiff)
[e]	3P (OrthPronDiff) or 1P (raised from [æ], PronDiff)
[o]	3P (OrthPronDiff) or 1P (raised from [ɔ], PronDiff)
[æ]	3P (PronDiff)
[ɔ]	3P (PronDiff)
[a]	1P (NoDiff) or 3P (NoDiff)

As a consequence, there are two competing hypotheses about solving the fragment completion task. In both cases we hypothesize that orthography plays a role. Under the first hypothesis the stem vowel identity, and therefore its ambiguity or lack thereof, is crucial. Under the second one the stem vowel identity does not affect processing much, and instead the paradigm information that comes with activating a lexical entry upon hearing the target fragment plays an overriding role. This leads to two distinct hierarchies in the difficulty of discrimination, depending on which hypothesis holds. Under the first hypothesis (stem vowel ambiguity is important), we expect the following (easy to difficult):

Hierarchy 1 (stem vowel ambiguity is important).

• (1)1p OrthPronDiff: [li-] from [lik^h-i] – unambiguous stem vowel, transparent orthography.
• (2)3p PronDiff: [k^hæ-] from [k^hæl-e] – unambiguous stem vowel, nontransparent orthography.
• (3)3p OrthPronDiff: [le-] from [lek^h-e] – ambiguous stem vowel, transparent orthography.
• (4)1p PronDiff: [k^he-] from [k^hel-i] – ambiguous stem vowel, nontransparent orthography.
• (5/6)NoDiff: [ma-] from [mar-e] or [mar-i] – undecidable.

Under the second hypothesis (stem vowel ambiguity is unimportant) the hierarchy is different, with orthography being the main driver (easy to difficult):

Hierarchy 2 (stem vowel ambiguity is not important).

• (1/2)1P OrthPronDiff: [li-] ([lik^h-i])/3P OrthPronDiff: [le-] ([lek^h-e]) – transparent orthography.
• (3/4)1P PronDiff: [k^he-] ([k^hel-i])/3P PronDiff: [k^hæ-] ([k^hæl-e]) – nontransparent orthography.
• (5/6)NoDiff: [ma-] from [mar-e] or [mar-i] – undecidable.

Here we expect that the stem vowel does not play any major role because as soon as the fragment is heard a lexical item is activated, which in turn retrieves the paradigm (i.e. a set of morphological forms). In particular the ambiguity of the stem vowels [e], [o] is therefore irrelevant because potential competing forms that have these stem vowels are no longer active. Here, we expect the question of whether the stem vowels of match/non-match are orthographically distinct to play the biggest role.

3.1. Methods and design

The eye tracking experiment conducted in this study is a cross-modal fragment completion task involving an auditory first-syllable fragment presented before two visual targets (match and non-match). Subjects were asked to decide from which word the auditory fragment was taken and respond with a button-press. We assessed both manual responses and eye movement patterns to match vs. non-match items to examine subjects' ability to discriminate the competing morphological forms.

3.1.1. Participants

Twenty-six native speakers of Bengali (average age: 23 years and 6 months) took part in this experiment, which was conducted at Jadavpur University, Kolkata (India). Subjects were mostly students at the university. All subjects had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Four subjects were excluded from the eye tracking analyses due to below-chance accuracy on the manual responses (see below), leaving 22 subjects and 3168 trials for further analysis.

3.1.2. Stimuli

Words in the NoDiff, PronDiff and OrthPronDiff conditions were the same as in Experiment 1. Stimuli were recorded by a female native speaker of Bengali. Auditory fragments comprised the first syllable of the 1^st person or 3^rdperson form (e.g. [k^he-] from [k^hel-i], [k^hæ-] from [k^hæl-e]). Fragments were cut so that corresponding forms were equal in duration (mean duration: 241 ms). For the words used in the experiment there are no competing monosyllabic verb stems in Bengali, i.e. forms that begin with the same fragment but belong to a different verb do not exist. The written word forms of corresponding 1^st person and 3^rd person served as match/non-match pairs (see Table 4).

Table 4.

Example stimuli for Experiment 2.

Condition	NoDiff low vowel/a/		PronDiff low-to-mid		OrthPronDiff mid-to-high
	3P	1P	3P	1P	3P	1P
Fragment	ma-	ma-	khæ-	khe-	le-	li-
Match	mar-e*/mar-i*		khæl-e	khel-i	lekh-e	likh-i
Non-match			khel-i	khæl-e	likh-i	lekh-e

Note. *visual targets representing 1^stperson and 3^rdperson forms are equally good matches for first syllables in the NoDiff condition since the first syllable is identical across both forms.

In total there were 144 trials, half of which contained a 1^st person fragment and half of which contained a 3^rd person fragment. Each word was used twice, once as a 1^st person target and once as a 3^rd person target. Note that for the NoDiff condition the distinction is purely nominal as the syllables for 1^st person and 3^rd person fragments are identical and subjects would have no way of knowing which of the visual items was declared the “match”. The trial sequence was blocked, so that the first and second half of the experiment contained one occurrence of each word, respectively, with the order of 1^st vs. 3^rd person counterbalanced across subjects. One third of the stimuli each contained words from the NoDiff, PronDiff, OrthPronDiff group of words, respectively.

Targets were presented on screen in a vertical arrangement with one item displayed 160 pixels above and one 160 pixels below a central fixation cross. This spatial configuration meant that the left edges of the two words were approximately equally distant from the central fixation. Half the trials presented the match at the top and the non-match at the bottom; the other half was reversed.

3.1.3. Procedure

Subjects received instructions about the task from a native speaker of Bengali. Written consent was obtained. A chin rest was used to place the subject in a stable position 60 cm in front of a 19-in. monitor. Subjects were instructed to use two buttons on a game pad in order to indicate which item on the screen (top or bottom) corresponded to the fragment they heard. They were asked to guess if they were unable to tell which item the fragment was taken from (i.e. in particular for any items from the NoDiff condition, which was, however, not mentioned specifically during instructions). A nine-point calibration was performed prior to the start of the experiment. Twelve practice trials were presented at the beginning of the procedure, before the onset of the experimental trials. Each trial started with a dot presented at the centre of the screen. Once the participant fixated the dot, the experimenter initiated the trial. The auditory fragment was presented through headphones (SONY MDR110) while a central fixation cross was visible on the screen. After 300 ms, the visual targets appeared above and below the fixation cross and remained on screen for 2000 ms. Eye movements were recorded throughout the procedure with an Eye Link 1000 Plus eye tracker.

3.2. Results

3.2.1. Manual responses

We first calculated the accuracy of manual responses over all decidable trials (PronDiff and OrthPronDiff condition). The average accuracy was M =0.67 (SE = 0.03). After excluding four subjects who showed accuracy <0.51, the mean accuracy was M = 0.72 (SE =0.01).

A repeated-measures ANOVA with factors Condition and Person revealed only a main effect of Condition (F(1,21) = 156.39, p < .0001), with the main effect of Person (F(1,21) = 1.87, p = .186) and the interaction of Condition and Person (F(1,21) = 3.1, p = .093) failing to reach significance. Responses in the PronDiff condition were not significantly different from chance (0.5), M = 0.54, S E = 0.02, t(21) = 1.62, p = .12. In the OrthPronDiff condition responses reached high levels of accuracy (M = 0.91, SE = 0.02, t(21) = 23.02, p < .0001).

However, because the front and back vowels in the PronDiff condition are realised differently in Bengali script, with back vowels not represented as a grapheme, but front vowels represented by the same grapheme, an additional analysis aimed to uncover potential differences in accuracy on the basis of vowel type. Because items in the NoDiff condition always contain the low vowel [a], a second ANOVA was conducted on only the response data from OrthPronDiff and PronDiff conditions, with factors Condition (OrthPronDiff, PronDiff), Person (1,3) and Vowel Type (front, back). This revealed a main effect of Condition (F(1,21) = 158.7, p < .0001) and a significant interaction of Condition and Vowel Type (F(1,21) = 10.81, p = .004). All other main effects and interactions were non-significant (Fs < 2.57, ps > 0.12). Follow-up single-sample t-tests against chance showed that in the PronDiff condition responses for items with back vowels had above chance accuracy (M = 0.576, SE = 0.032, t(21) = 2.391, p = .026), whereas responses for items with front vowels were at chance (M = 0.498, SE = 0.024, t(21) = 0.079, p = .93).

3.2.2. Overall proportion of looking at the matching item

In a first analysis, we calculated the proportion of looking falling onto the matching item across the entire trial as the total amount of looking falling onto the matching item divided by the total amount of looking falling on either the match or the non-match item (see Fig. 2 for distribution of scores).

Fig. 2.

Looking proportion directed at the matching item across the three conditions.

These proportion scores were subjected to a repeated-measures ANOVA with factors Condition (NoDiff, PronDiff, OrthPronDiff) and Person (1,3). This revealed a significant main effect of Condition (all Greenhouse-Geisser corrected; F(1.828, 38.388) = 94.937, p < .001, η²_p = 0.819). The main effect of Person (F(1,21) = 0.63, p > .43, η²_p = 0.029) and interaction of Condition and Person (F(1.457,30.605) = 1.944, p = .169, η²_p = 0.085) were not significant. Posthoc tests showed that the OrthPronDiff condition (M = 0.677, SE = 0.014) resulted in longer target looking than the PronDiff condition (M = 0.523, SE = 0.008, t(21) = 10.88, p < .001) and the NoDiff condition (M = 0.505, SE = 0.007; t(21) = 11.31, p < .001). Target looking in the PronDiff condition and NoDiff condition was not statistically different (t(21) = 1.62, p = .364, all Bonferroni-corrected for multiple comparisons).

3.2.3. Detailed eye movement analysis

While the above analysis appears to indicate that responses for NoDiff and PronDiff trials were similar, a more differentiated picture can be obtained if the time course of looking unfolding over the trial is taken into consideration.

Growth curve analysis (Mirman, 2014; Mirman, Dixon, & Magnuson, 2008) offers the possibility to analyse detailed eye tracking time course data using multilevel models. This involves fitting a polynomial curve to the shifting gaze pattern across the trial, or a certain time window within the trial. Compared to conducting statistical analyses for instance over a series of individual time-bins of looking data, the advantage is that the gaze pattern is captured by just a few parameters that define the curve, and the question of whether the curves for two types of trials differ statistically can be answered by the model. Growth curve analyses have recently become popular for eye tracking analyses, particularly in the context of visual world paradigms that investigate the time course of looking at a target over distractors in the context of speech processing (e.g. Chow, Aimola Davies, & Plunkett, 2017; Ito, Pickering, & Corley, 2018; Kukona, 2020).

Due to the nature of the task, subjects' gaze fell either on the match first or the non-match first. Scan patterns typically began at the top item, meaning approximately 50% of the trials were match-first, the remainder non-match-first. In order to compare whether looking patterns unfolded differently for trials where the first item encountered was the match, we plotted gaze-patterns as the probability of looking at the first-fixated item, separately for match-first and non-match-first trials (see Fig. 3, Fig. 4). Trivially, these gaze patterns begin at 1. They then show a dip when (at least on some trials) subjects move on to the second item, and may then show a rise again as subjects return to the first item. The degree to which there is a dip and/or return to the first item is modulated by the trial type, as we shall see below.

Fig. 3.

Discrimination models: Data for NoDiff (a), PronDiff (b) and OrthPronDiff (c) conditions, with model predictions (separate models testing the effect of Direction of first fixation and Person in each condition). Red items represent Match-first trials, teal items represent Non-match-first trials. Lines depict model predictions (solid: 1^stperson, dashed: 3^rdperson), circles show data from 1^stperson trials and triangles show data from 3^rdperson trials. Shaded areas illustrate standard errors of the mean. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 4.

Condition comparison model for match-first trials: Data and model predictions. Shaded areas show standard errors of the mean.

For the growth curve analyses we needed to first decide on the specific models to be fitted, identify a suitable time window, and determine the order of the most suitable polynomial to be fitted to the gaze patterns. The aim of the modelling process is to determine the best-fitting curve, and this implies determining optimal shape parameters for a polynomial of a given order. Like any mixed-effects model, the process involves the selection of the “best model fit” on the basis of parameter optimisation. In addition to the fixed effects, so-called “time terms”, the parameters for the polynomial, form a part of the fitting process as well. On the basis of visual inspection, we decided that 4th order polynomials would be appropriate in this particular case. In other words, the fitting procedure involves four additional time parameters, the linear, quadratic, cubic and quartic time terms. Also based on visual inspection we selected the window of 1200 to 2200 ms after auditory onset, where 1200 ms corresponds approximately to the point at which subjects began to disengage from the first-fixated word.

Since match-first and non-match-first trials result in very different eye gaze patterns, it was not possible to fit growth curve models to both types of trials and all conditions simultaneously.⁸ We therefore fitted two separate sets of models which complement each other:

• (a)Discrimination models (one model per condition, comparing match-first vs. non-match-first gaze patterns)

An important indication of whether subjects are able to solve the task of matching the auditory fragment to the correct visual item is a difference in the time course of match-first vs. non-match-first trials in the same condition. If it cannot be decided whether a particular item is a match for the auditory fragment or not, the time course of trials where subjects started on either item (i.e. either match-first or non-match first) should look identical. As we will see below, that is exactly what we find for the NoDiff condition. By contrast, if subjects can easily decide whether they are looking at a match or not, then the two types of trials (match-first, non-match-first) differ, because a matching item, recognised as such, holds a subject's gaze for longer than a non-matching item, which can be rejected rapidly. We thus expect an easily decidable condition to result in a larger discrepancy between match-first and non-match-first trials, compared to a condition that is harder to decide. While manual accuracy scores give us information about whether, on average, subjects did or did not manage to identify the matching item, these curves can give us more fine-grained insight into how easy or difficult the discrimination task was. As a first instance we therefore establish whether the eye movement patterns differ significantly depending on whether the subjects' gaze fell first on the match or non-match. In total, there are therefore three Discrimination models, using fixed factors Direction of first fixation (match-first vs. non-match-first) and Person (“Discrimination models”, see Fig. 3). We predicted that for the NoDiff condition, there would not be a difference between match- and non-match-first trials because it should not be possible to decide which of the written forms the auditory fragment corresponds to. By contrast, we predicted that the auditory fragments in the PronDiff and the OrthPronDiff conditions would provide enough cues to make a decision, i.e. in all other conditions match-first and non-match-first trials should have clearly distinct gaze patterns.

• (b)Condition comparison models (one model for match-first trials across all conditions and one model for non-match-first trials across all conditions)

A comparison across conditions is necessary to quantify to what extent gaze patterns are different across conditions. Here we ask, for example, whether subjects' gaze was captured by the matching item systematically for a longer time in one condition or the other. To compare separately how the condition affected looking in match-first vs. non-match-first trials, we therefore fitted two separate models with fixed factors Condition and Person. We expected differences between the NoDiff condition and the remaining conditions in both trial types. We also predicted that looking patterns in the OrthPronDiff condition should exhibit the fastest non-match rejection in non-match-first trials and the most consistent looking at the match (i.e. lack of moving away) in the match-first trials. We expected looking patterns in the PronDiff condition to fall between the NoDiff and the OrthPronDiff condition in both match-first and non-match-first trials, reflecting the fact that while the auditory fragment allows a matching to morphological form, the visual representation generated on the basis of hearing the fragment matches both visually presented targets to some extent.

In order to conduct the growth curve analyses, we fitted logistic mixed effects models with the R-package lme4 (Bates et al., 2015) to the data. As described above, corresponding to the curved pattern in the data, we used fourth-order orthogonal polynomials, and modelled the time window between 1200 ms and 2200 ms after the onset of the auditory stimulus. We began with a base model containing only the time terms and crossed random effects of participants and items on intercepts. We then added fixed factors Direction of first fixation and Person as well as interactions⁹ in a step-wise fashion, using model comparisons to evaluate the improvements in model fit. Below we present only summaries of the statistical modelling results, with detailed results presented in Appendix B.

3.2.3.1. Models testing discrimination of match vs. non-match (Discrimination models)

These models were fitted to establish subjects' ability to perform the task of fragment completion in each condition (separately). The rationale is that if it matters whether match or non-match are fixated first, with match-first fixations leading to a higher proportion of looking at that item, then subjects are able to discriminate between match and non-match. Final models included fixed effects of Direction of first fixation (match-first, non-match-first) and Person (1P, 3P) and interactions on all time terms, and random effects of subjects and items on the intercepts. Match-first trials were treated as the baseline, as were 1^st person trials. Detailed results of model comparisons and final model (parameter estimates) are provided in Appendix B.

In the NoDiff condition (Fig. 3a) neither the addition of an effect of Direction of first fixation (χ² (1) = 1.3455, p > .24) nor of an effect of Person (χ²(1) = 0.053, p > .81) on the intercept improved the model fit. This reflects the fact that both items were possible matches for the fragment. The addition of an interaction of Direction of first fixation and Person improved the model (χ²(1) = 38.96, p < .0001). This reflects a higher likelihood of looking back at a 1^st person item if it was encountered first, consistent with the 3^rd person being considered a default. The addition of an effect of Direction of first fixation on the quadratic time term also significantly improved the model fit, as did the addition of an effect of Person on the linear and cubic terms, and the addition of an interaction on the linear and quartic terms (see Appendix B, Table 8). These changes to the shape of the curve also reflect the 3^rd person default status. See Appendix B, Table 9 for parameter estimates for the best-fitting model.

In the PronDiff condition (Fig. 3b), the effect of Direction of first fixation on the intercept significantly improved the model fit (χ² (1) = 241.28, p < .0001). Clearly, participants' eye movements in response to seeing either the match or the non-match first were distinct in the PronDiff condition, indicating that participants discriminated these items. The effect of Person only had an effect on some of the time terms, but not on the intercept (χ²(1) = 0.0013, p > .97). However, the addition of an interaction of Direction of first fixation and Person on the intercept yielded a significant improvement (χ²(1) = 5.22, p = .022), reflecting the fact that for match-first trials Person played a role, but not for non-match-first trials (see below). The addition of the effects on some of the time terms also improved the model fit, in particular the addition of an effect of Direction of first fixation on the quadratic term, the effect of Person on the linear and quartic terms and the addition of the interaction on the linear, quadratic and cubic time terms (for details see Appendix B, Table 10). The best-fitting model overall was therefore the one with these time terms on the interactions, see Appendix B, Table 11.

For OrthPronDiff trials (Fig. 3c), the effect of Direction of first fixation on the intercept significantly improved model fit (χ²(1) = 8812.2, p < .0001). The effect of Person on the intercept failed to improve model fit (intercept: χ²(1) = 0.0009, p > .97), but the addition of an interaction term of Direction and Person on the intercept yielded a trend (χ²(1) = 2.83, p = .09). These results imply that subjects were clearly able to distinguish between match and non-match in this condition. There were improvements in model fit also for the addition of effects on the time terms, in particular the addition of Direction of first fixation on the linear and quadratic time term, of Person on the quadratic, cubic and quartic time terms and the addition of the interaction on the linear, quadratic and cubic time terms, implying that the shape of the curve was also different depending on the two factors. Detailed results of the model comparison and parameter estimates for the final model are provided in Appendix B (Table 12, Table 13).

In summary, these three models demonstrate that subjects were able to distinguish match and non-match items not just for the OrthPronDiff condition, but also for the PronDiff condition (but not in the undecidable NoDiff condition). In other words, the eye movement patterns allow for more detailed insight into subjects' processing compared to the manual responses.

These separate models, however, do not allow us to compare the time course of looking across OrthPronDiff and PronDiff conditions, and thereby to determine whether they differ in terms of how easy matching the fragment to the visual target is. In order to do this, we turn to models that contain data from all three conditions, though separate for match-first and non-match-first trials.

3.2.3.2. Models comparing the time course of looking across conditions (Condition comparison models)

As described above, in order to understand better to what extent the time course of looking differs across the conditions, we fitted two separate models to the match-first trials vs. the non-match-first trials. Final models included fixed effects of Condition (NoDiff, PronDiff, OrthDiff) and Person (1p, 3p) on all time terms, and random effects of subjects and items on the intercepts. The NoDiff condition was treated as a baseline in the models, as was 1^st person. Fixed effects were added in a step-wise fashion and model comparisons were used to evaluate the improvements in model fit. Fig. 4 shows data and predictions for the best-fitting model for match-first trials, and Fig. 5 the corresponding for non-match-first trials. Results for model comparisons are summarised below and provided in detail in Appendix B, Table 14 (match-first) and Table 16 (non-match-first). Parameter estimates for best-fitting models are given in Tables 15 (match-first) and Table 17 (non-match-first).

Fig. 5.

Condition comparison model for non-match-first trials: Data and model predictions. Shaded areas show standard errors of the mean.

Match-first trials The addition of an effect of Condition on the intercept improved the model fit (χ² (2) = 57.72, p < .0001). The addition of an effect of Person on the intercept did not improve the model fit (χ²(1) = 0.539, p > .46), and nor did the addition of a Condition x Person interaction (χ²(2) = 2.205, p > .33). The addition of the effect of Condition on the linear, quadratic, cubic and quartic time terms also improved the models (see Appendix B, Table 14), as did the addition of Person on all time terms. The addition of the interaction on linear and quartic time terms also yielded further improvements.

Inspecting the best-fitting model (see Appendix B, Table 15, for model estimates with respect to base NoDiff) reveals in particular that the main effect of Condition on the intercept shows a significant difference for the OrthPronDiff condition (p < .0006) compared to the base NoDiff, and a trend for the difference between PronDiff and NoDiff conditions. The difference between OrthDiff and PronDiff is also significant (p < .0001).¹⁰

Non-match-first trials The effect of Condition on the intercept improved the model fit (χ² (2) = 206.26, p < .0001). The addition of the effect of Condition on the linear, quadratic, cubic and quartic time terms led to further improvements (see Appendix B, Table 16). The addition of an effect of Person (χ²(1) = 0.32, p > .57) or of an interaction term (χ²(2) = 1.271, p > .53) on the intercept failed to do so, although adding the effect of Person on the linear, quadratic and quartic time terms did improve the fit and the addition of the interaction to the linear, quadratic and cubic time terms did as well.

In the best-fitting model (cf. Table 17), the difference between base NoDiff and OrthPronDiff conditions was significant (p < .0001), as was the difference between NoDiff and PronDiff (p = .007). OrthPronDiff and PronDiff conditions were also significantly different (p < .0001).

3.3. Discussion

As the models testing Discrimination demonstrate, subjects distinguish between match and non-match in both the OrthPronDiff and the PronDiff condition, despite the low manual response performance and overall looking time results in the PronDiff condition. The models testing the effect of Condition further confirm that PronDiff and OrthPronDiff conditions exhibit looking patterns that are different from each other. The OrthPronDiff condition seems easy to decide, with very distinct match-first vs. non-match-first curves, and high rates of looking at the match in both types of trial (remaining on the match when this is the first visual item encountered and rapidly rejecting the non-match when that is encountered first). The PronDiff condition seems more difficult to decide, with gaze patterns reflecting more pronounced shifts between the two visual items, and in particular very rapid movement away from the first item. Nevertheless, differences between match-first and non-match-first trials are clearly present, so subjects discriminate between the items, with an overall higher likelihood of remaining at or returning to the first item if this is the fully matching form. Considering the manual responses in this condition were at chance, this is quite remarkable. Eye movements reveal that subjects were in fact able to match items from this condition, contradictory to their low manual response accuracy.

Models also showed a difference between 1^st person and 3^rd person trials, as the Condition x Person interaction on time terms shows for match-first trials. Inspecting the plots in Fig. 4, it appears that the differences between 3^rd person and 1^st person are very similar across the OrthPronDiff and the PronDiff condition, which otherwise appear merely shifted in terms of the intercepts. There is a general tendency for subjects' gaze shifting towards the 3^rd person item, whether this is the target or not. This results in higher looking proportions at the match for 3^rd person trials towards the end of the trials, and lower looking proportions at the match for 1^st person trials. We believe that this is caused by the 3^rd person's status as the base form.

Inspecting the three conditions side by side shows that in the condition with an easy decision (OrthPronDiff) match-first and non-match-first trials result in the biggest difference, with long lingering on match and quick rejection of the non-match. The undecidable condition (NoDiff) results in shorter looking at the first item before moving away, but the hard-to-decide condition (PronDiff) shows even shorter looking at the first target – for both match- and non-match-first trials. In terms of the two alternative hierarchies given above, the data clearly correspond better to the second hypothesis (Hierarchy 2), where orthography plays a major role and the stem vowel ambiguity is less important. Trials in the OrthPronDiff condition were easiest to decide, as shown by the largest differences between match-first and non-match first trials (Fig. 3c). The precise time course in comparison to other conditions is most visible in match-first trials in Fig. 4, up until about 1800 ms after the fragment onset. Here subjects' lingering on the match at the beginning of the trial reflects the hierarchy as predicted, with subjects' proportion of looking at the first item (i.e. lack of looking away) highest for OrthPronDiff 1^st person trials, followed by OrthPronDiff 3^rd person trials. In other words, subjects in OrthPronDiff trials show a higher likelihood of maintaining looking at the matching item if this is seen first. These looking patterns are mirrored in the non-match-first trials (Fig. 5), where OrthPronDiff trials display the lowest likelihood of remaining on the first item – in other words, subjects rapidly reject the non-match and move their eyes towards the match, where they largely remain. Again, this is a slightly stronger effect in the 1^st person trials than in the 3^rd person trials.

PronDiff trials were harder to decide, as is clear from Fig. 3(b). Fig. 4, Fig. 5 allow a comparison of the time course across these conditions. For match-first trials, the likelihood of remaining on the first item (the match) is clearly lower than the corresponding trials in the OrthPronDiff condition, and this is mirrored in the non-match-first trials, where compared to the OrthPronDiff condition subjects initially reject the non-matching item to a similar extent, but then are quite likely to return. We believe this in particular reflects the uncertainty in this condition. Finally, Fig. 3(a) shows that the NoDiff items were undecidable.

Had the stem vowel ambiguity played a more important role in this hierarchy than orthographic transparency, we would have expected 3^rd person trials in the PronDiff condition to be more easily decidable than either 3^rd person OrthPronDiff trials or 1^st person PronDiff trials (with [e], [o] being ambiguous as a predictor of Person). This was not the case, however. We therefore conclude that the looking patterns we identified here are clear indications of the association with distinct vs. identical graphemes being the driving factor underlying the difficulty of morphological discrimination.

However, in the hypothesized Hierarchy 2 we did not predict the systematic differences we find between 1^st and 3^rd person trials. There are two potential underlying causes for differences between the 1^st person and 3^rd person forms. One is the ambiguity of the stem vowel in terms of either its ability to predict the suffix, or its association with a specific grapheme (even if effects are not as strong as predicted by Hierarchy 1 proposed above), a second one is the fact that the 3^rd person as base form is more easily accessed (activated as soon as a lexical entry is activated). However, the stem vowel ambiguity differs across PronDiff and OrthPronDiff condition (OrthPronDiff: 1^st person [i], [u] are uniquely associated with 1^st person/3^rd person [e], [o] are ambiguous; PronDiff: 1^st person [o], [e] are ambiguous, 3^rd person [æ], [ɔ] are unambiguous). In contrast, the Person-related shifts in the looking patterns appear very similar across the PronDiff and OrthPronDiff condition. We therefore believe that differences between 1p and 3p forms are caused by the 3^rd person item being the base form, rather than reflecting the level of ambiguity of the fragment vowel.

4. General discussion

In this paper, we used a set of inflectional stimuli in Bengali to investigate the interaction between phonology and orthography to determine to what extent each of the domains impacts processing and lexical access. Unlike previous research in this domain, the paradigm under investigation involves a completely predictable phonological alternation (governed by the high-vowel suffix [‐i]) for which orthographic transparency varies systematically. In contrast to previously addressed questions such as work on the processing and storage of regular and irregular past tense forms in English, for instance (e.g. Crepaldi et al., 2010; Marcus et al., 1995; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1998; McClelland & Patterson, 2002; Pastizzo & Feldman, 2002; Pinker, 1991), vowel raising in Bengali inflection is completely regular: The stem vowels [æ, e, ɔ, o] raise to [e, i, o, u] in the context of the 1^st person suffix [‐i] but remain the same as in the citation form (verbal noun ending in [-a]) in the 3^rd person form ([-e]). Only the alternations [e ~ i] and [o ~ u] are reflected in the writing system while in the case of [æ ~ e] and [ɔ ~ o] the orthography remains the same despite raising of the vowel. We thus asked to what extent this alternation and its representation in the orthography result in differences in the access and discrimination mechanisms.

Both studies we presented here therefore investigated processing of three different groups of verbs, those exhibiting no differences in stem vowel between 1^st person and 3^rd person (NoDiff), those exhibiting vowel raising but without a change in orthography (PronDiff), and those exhibiting vowel raising and a corresponding change in orthography (OrthPronDiff). The first method employed was a cross-modal lexical decision task (Experiment 1) as it is the most frequently used method to investigate differences in lexical access. However, as the prime and target pairs are semantically identical the likelihood of strong priming effects across all three groups of verbs was high, and results indeed confirmed that priming was similar in all three types of words. We therefore also used eye-tracking with fragment completion in a forced-choice response paradigm (Experiment 2), which (a) uses a more sensitive task as subjects have to discriminate between two existing forms, and (b) allows for the use of detailed time course analysis of looking patterns. While the lexical decision task (Experiment 1) provided a global assessment of lexical access, this second study allowed us to probe whether the subtle differences in our stimuli generate differences in processing patterns rather than simply in the speed of full lexical access.

In Experiment 1, the results indicate that priming of the verbal noun is attenuated when the stem vowels in prime and target do not match (i.e. after a 1^st person prime, but not after a 3^rd person prime). One might argue that this could be due to a lesser degree of overlap: when the auditory prime is processed, its orthographic representation is activated, and the grapheme representing the stem vowel is identical to that of the verbal noun in all three word groups for 3^rd person primes, but only in two word groups for 1^st person primes. However, if this was the reason for the differences between 1^st person and 3^rd person primes, then there should also be an interaction with Condition, as only 1^st person primes in the OrthPronDiff condition activate a different grapheme. Since no difference between the NoDiff, PronDiff and OrthPronDiff conditions was found in Experiment 1, the greater degree of facilitation observed after 3^rd person primes is likely to be caused by the more basic nature of the 3^rd person in the inflectional paradigm (see Bybee, 2001; Lahiri, 1982). The lexical decision task thus did not provide any difference in lexical access between the conditions – but this is not altogether surprising, given the strong semantic relatedness of primes and targets.

Experiment 2 offered more fine-grained insight into the differences in processing across the three verb groups. In this task, hearing a fragment was expected to activate an orthographic representation which could then be matched to one of two visual targets. By forcing a discrimination decision between these semantically identical forms, which could be made with more or less certainty depending on the type of word presented, we were able to identify subtle differences in processing.

In particular, what stands out is the discrepancy between the manual response data and eye movement patterns. Button-press responses for the PronDiff condition indicated that subjects found the task hard, and in fact on average performance did not exceed chance. At the same time the eye movement patterns showed diverging results for trials during which fixations first fell on the match vs. on the non-match. Clearly subjects did reject a non-match to a greater extent than a matching target, and they moved on faster than they did in the NoDiff condition, where both items are potential matches. This implies that even for words where there is only a vowel alternation on its own, the alternation allows rapid prediction of the relevant suffix even if this is a smaller effect than for the OrthPronDiff condition.

Taken together, our experiments demonstrate that phonology and orthography both impact on lexical access in inflectional morphology. If orthographic differences made the discrimination of forms easy, but phonology had no impact at all, we would expect performance in the PronDiff condition to be equal to the NoDiff condition. If, on the other hand, phonological differences were the main driving factor, we would expect performance in PronDiff and OrthPronDiff conditions to be similar. What we found in the eye tracking task, by contrast, was that all three conditions are clearly distinct: phonological differences only just allow subjects to discriminate between match and non-match, and the low-accuracy manual responses indicate that there is a lot of uncertainty about the discrimination decision, but when orthography changes as well, the decision becomes easy. Perhaps more surprising than the fact that orthographic contrasts make the decision easy is the fact that their absence made the decision so difficult. Manual performance in the PronDiff condition was at chance, indicating that even though subjects' eye movements suggest differential processing of match and non-match in the immediate aftermath of hearing the fragment, the decision is a hard one to make. Clearly the phonological contrast is very subtle. Importantly though, in terms of phonological similarity there is no reason to suggest that the two forms in the OrthPronDiff condition are easier to discriminate – any gains in this condition in terms of performance are due to the fact that there are contrasting graphemes involved.

What is the implication for the mental activation patterns involved? After hearing the auditory fragment (but before processing the visual targets), are subjects equally certain in the PronDiff and the OrthPronDiff condition about whether they heard a part of a 1^st person or a 3^rd person item? Arguably, differences between the PronDiff and the OrthPronDiff condition could arise afterwards during the visual identification of the target item – i.e. it could be the visual matching process that is harder in the PronDiff condition (by definition there are fewer cues here than in the OrthPronDiff condition). However, if that were the only reason for a discrepancy between PronDiff and OrthPronDiff conditions, we would certainly expect above-chance manual performance in the PronDiff condition. To illustrate, we propose that the processes occurring upon presentation of the auditory fragment are as follows: (1) hearing the fragment activates a lexical entry (corresponding to the stem), (2) this retrieves an associated paradigm, i.e. a set of morphological features with phonological realisations. (3) This allows selecting the best match, i.e. identification of the precise morphological features, which also results in fragment completion, i.e. activation of the appropriate suffix and finally (4) a corresponding orthographic representation. (5) Once the visual stimuli are presented, the mental representation can be used to accept or reject the visual items. Note that the result of steps (1) and (2) is that both potential target items (i.e. 1^st and 3^rd person forms) are partially activated, but (3) narrows the set of competitors down to a single item where possible. It is this process that differs between the PronDiff and OrthPronDiff conditions.

To illustrate with an example, once the syllable [k^he-] is heard, this activates the lexical entry for /k^hæla/ ‘play’(1). The fragment would not be able to activate a lexical entry for */k^hela/because it does not exist in the lexicon. The activation of the lexical entry means that the set of morphological forms associated with this lexical entry becomes accessible, including the 1^st and 3^rd person forms [k^heli] and [k^hæle] (2). This constitutes partial activation of both forms, but [k^heli] is then selected as best match, and this selection process constitutes the completion of the form, i.e. the prediction of the suffix [‐i] (3). Now that one specific form is expected (both stem and suffix), the orthographic form is generated (4). Once a visual stimulus is encountered it is either matched () or rejected () (note the difference between the two Bengali grapheme sequences represents the suffix vowel, not the stem).

As already mentioned we believe our data show that the critical part in this sequence of processes, which differs across the OrthPronDiff and PronDiff conditions, is step (3), the decision about which exact morphological form has been heard (and therefore which suffix is required). The presentation of any 1^st or 3^rd person fragment necessarily co-activates partially the other, due to phonological overlap (onset sounds) and subsequently semantic overlap once the lexical entry is activated. The difficulty of the decision about which form has been heard is therefore a function of the degree of overlap in the mental representation of 1^st and 3^rd person. In terms of phonetics [k^he-] is as different from [k^hæ-] as [li-] is from [le-] (from [lik^h-i]/[lek^h-e], 1^st and 3^rd person forms in the OrthPronDiff condition). The difference between the OrthPronDiff and PronDiff conditions is therefore only explained if the representation of the two vowels by different graphemes in the OrthPronDiff condition is useful. In other words, an advantage results from the mental representations of the stem vowels at this stage being more easily separable because they have in the past been encountered with two distinct graphemes. In other words, we argue here that the phonological representations are orthographically influenced.

There are no reasons to assume that (1) or (2) should be different across the two conditions, and once a full phonological form has been activated (i.e. fragment completion/morphological discrimination have occurred in step 3), generating an orthographic representation (4) is fully deterministic and ought to be equivalent across the conditions. If the differences only arose during visual matching (5), then the decision in the PronDiff condition might be harder than in the OrthPronDiff condition (due to the greater visual overlap between 1^st and 3^rd person in the orthographic representation), but it would be feasible to make that decision as the suffix is available and unambiguous. It is not clear how chance-level manual responses would then be explained. As discussed above, there are no differences in phonological similarity between the pairs of stem vowels across the two conditions. We therefore argue that due to the existence of an orthographic contrast subjects are more certain about which form they heard in the OrthPronDiff condition.

Is it nevertheless possible that differences between OrthPronDiff and PronDiff conditions only arise here for task-based reasons, i.e. an orthographic representation is only activated because participants need it for visual matching with the targets? In other words, is it possible that steps (4)/(5) are really the source of the critical differences, but in a naturalistic listening scenario these would not be required for processing, and step (3) is in fact not the locus of the difficulty at all? We believe our data hold the answer to this. Let us assume the decision process is solely different across the conditions because of an activated orthographic representation. Then the OrthPronDiff condition should be easier to decide than the PronDiff condition (because the representation of two distinct graphemes facilitates the process). But in the PronDiff condition, words with a front and back vowel should present an equal level of difficulty because in both cases the stem vowel is represented identically across the 1^st and 3^rd person (i.e. the stem vowel cannot help with the decision). We would therefore expect no differences between PronDiff words with front vs. back vowels. Yet that is not what we found: subjects displayed above-chance accuracy for words with back vowels, which are not at all represented graphemically, but their responses did not exceed chance for words with front vowels, which are represented by the same grapheme. In other words, overlapping stem vowel representations interfere more than if the stem vowel is not represented. This, in our view, is evidence that the locus of the difficulty is the (orthographically influenced) phonological representation, and not an orthographic representation per se: Back vowel words in the PronDiff condition are not affected, either positively or negatively, by orthography because the stem vowels are not written. Front vowels are written with the same grapheme, and this makes phonological mental represenatations such as those of [k^hæl-e] and [k^hel-i] highly confusable. OrthPronDiff words are written with two distinct graphemes and this makes the phonological representation of /lek^h-e/ and /lik^h-i/ highly distinct.

Of course, while the vowel type differences imply that orthographically influenced phonological representations are the main underlying factor determining discrimination in this task, we cannot entirely exclude the possibility that task-induced orthographic activation contributes to the effect, or its strength. In order to do this, one would have to conduct an experiment that does not rely on visual stimuli – a goal for future research.

However, as explained above, we conclude that the critical step is fragment completion, and this resolution of the morphological form has to occur in speech processing independent of whether there is a grapheme-based task. Since Bengali is a verb-final PRO-drop language there is no argument to be made that in spoken language the relevant information may not have to be decoded from the morphological form – on the contrary, verb morphology has a crucial role.

Our interpretation is that the very existence of an orthographic contrast has over time sensitised listeners to the phonological contrast between the alternating forms, meaning that subjects are more likely to notice the vowel alternation during processing. In other words, encountering two distinct graphemic realisations over and over again in the context of a vowel alternation (in the OrthPronDiff condition, but not in the PronDiff condition) may have shaped the phonological representation itself. Alternatively the automatic co-activation of an orthographic representation means that overall activation patterns in the OrthPronDiff condition are more distict. Our study cannot discriminate between these two possibilities. What is certain is that orthographic alternations have a clear impact on phonological discrimination in the context of inflectional morphology. While Bengali vowel raising provides an ideal testing scenario for such an interaction, due to its high level of regularity, this has implications for morphophonological processes in general. It is difficult to capture such effects in languages such as English or German experimentally because of the prevalence of vowel alternations in irregular forms rather than across large categories of words and because the simultaneous effects of orthography and phonology are less frequent and less regular. Our results imply that phonological alternations can be used by listeners to predict upcoming suffix information, allowing the morphological form to be resolved more quickly – in other words, they contribute to efficient processing. However, if solely phonological in nature, these benefits are rather subtle and whether subjects make use of them in natural speech processing seems doubtful – it is orthographic transparency that provides the real boost. Spelling alternations clearly have a profound impact on the discrimination of morphophonological forms.

Appendix A. Bengali transcription and full stimulus list

Table 5.

PronDiff word list (low-to-mid vowel change).

Table 6.

OrthPronDiff word list (mid-to-high vowel change).

Table 7.

NoDiff word list (low vowel/a/).

Appendix B. Models – full results

B.1. Discrimination models

The base model always contained only the four time terms and random effects of subjects and items on the intercept.

Table 8.

NoDiff model comparisons.

Added effect	χ2	df	p
Direction of First Fixation (Intercept)	1.35	1	0.246
Direction of First Fixation (Linear)	3.81	1	0.051
Direction of First Fixation (Quadratic)	7.92	1	0.005
Direction of First Fixation (Cubic)	0.45	1	0.502
Direction of First Fixation (Quartic)	1.03	1	0.309
Person (Intercept)	0.05	1	0.818
Person (Linear)	16.89	1	<0.0001
Person (Quadratic)	1.13	1	0.287
Person (Cubic)	11.66	1	0.0006
Person (Quartic)	0.65	1	0.421
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Intercept)	38.96	1	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Linear)	19.77	1	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Quadratic)	0.32	1	0.570
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Cubic)	0.09	1	0.762
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Quartic)	7.75	1	0.005

Table 9.

Parameter estimates for best-fitting NoDiff model (w.r.t. base: Nonmatch-first/1P).

	Est.	SE	z	p
Intercept	0.52	0.13	4.10	<0.0001
Linear	−3.64	0.22	−16.77	<0.0001
Quadratic	5.63	0.22	25.21	<0.0001
Cubic	−2.98	0.21	−14.39	<0.0001
Quartic	0.67	0.19	3.56	0.0004
Direction of First Fixation (MF) Intercept	0.11	0.04	2.97	0.003
Direction of First Fixation (MF) Linear	0.39	0.31	1.26	0.209
Direction of First Fixation (MF) Quadratic	0.31	0.31	0.98	0.329
Direction of First Fixation (MF) Cubic	0.06	0.29	0.21	0.838
Direction of First Fixation (MF) Quartic	−0.32	0.27	−1.19	0.23
Person (3P) Intercept	0.09	0.07	1.34	0.181
Person (3P) Linear	1.46	0.30	4.86	0.000
Person (3P) Quadratic	0.07	0.31	0.23	0.815
Person (3P) Cubic	−0.33	0.29	−1.15	0.249
Person (3P) Quartic	−0.65	0.26	−2.49	0.013
Direction of First Fixation x Person Intercept	−0.19	0.05	−3.73	0.000
Direction of First Fixation x Person Linear	−2.14	0.44	−4.86	0.000
Direction of First Fixation x Person Quadratic	0.80	0.45	1.77	0.077
Direction of First Fixation x Person Cubic	−0.60	0.42	−1.44	0.149
Direction of First Fixation x Person Quartic	1.06	0.38	2.80	0.005

MF = Match-first.

Table 10.

PronDiff model comparisons.

Added effect	χ2	df	p
Direction of First Fixation (Intercept)	241.28	1	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation (Linear)	3.51	1	0.061
Direction of First Fixation (Quadratic)	14.37	1	0.0001
Direction of First Fixation (Cubic)	1.09	1	0.297
Direction of First Fixation (Quartic)	1.06	1	0.302
Person (Intercept)	0.001	1	0.971
Person (Linear)	24.58	1	<0.0001
Person (Quadratic)	1.34	1	0.247
Person (Cubic)	2.89	1	0.089
Person (Quartic)	13.82	1	0.0002
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Intercept)	5.22	1	0.022
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Linear)	73.17	1	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Quadratic)	21.41	1	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Cubic)	44.75	1	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Quartic)	0.10	1	0.748

Table 11.

Parameter estimates for best-fitting PronDiff model (w. r. t. base: Non-match-first/1P).

	Est.	SE	z	p
Intercept	0.16	0.11	1.45	0.148
Linear	−1.41	0.19	−7.39	<0.0001
Quadratic	6.11	0.20	30.39	<0.0001
Cubic	−4.97	0.19	−25.53	<0.0001
Quartic	1.38	0.16	8.77	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation (MF) Intercept	0.25	0.03	7.35	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation (MF) Linear	−0.34	0.26	−1.31	0.191
Direction of First Fixation (MF) Quadratic	−1.91	0.27	−6.97	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation n(MF) Cubic	1.35	0.26	5.117	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation (MF) Quartic	0.15	0.18	0.83	0.406
Person (3P) Intercept	−0.08	0.09	−0.95	0.342
Person (3P) Linear	0.07	0.26	0.29	0.771
Person (3P) Quadratic	−1.16	0.27	−4.34	<0.0001
Person (3P) Cubic	1.15	0.26	4.40	<0.0001
Person (3P) Quartic	−0.69	0.18	−3.869	0.0001
Direction of First Fixation x Person Intercept	0.15	0.05	3.19	0.0014
Direction of First Fixation x Person Linear	1.71	0.36	4.77	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation x Person Quadratic	2.43	0.37	6.59	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation x Person Cubic	−2.40	0.36	−6.69	<0.0001

MF = match-first.

Table 12.

OrthPronDiff model comparisons.

Added effect	χ2	df	p
Direction of First Fixation (Intercept)	8812.24	1	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation (Linear)	296.51	1	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation (Quadratic)	283.99	1	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation (Cubic)	0.12	1	0.730
Direction of First Fixation (Quartic)	3.39	1	0.066
Person (Intercept)	0.0009	1	0.976
Person (Linear)	1.25	1	0.263
Person (Quadratic)	53.79	1	<0.0001
Person (Cubic)	4.56	1	0.033
Person (Quartic)	4.69	1	0.030
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Intercept)	2.83	1	0.093
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Linear)	353.64	1	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Quadratic)	4.2	1	0.040
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Cubic)	17.22	1	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation x Person (Quartic)	0.007	1	0.933

Table 13.

Parameter estimates for OrthPronDiff model (w.r.t. base: Non-match-first/1P).

	Est.	SE	z	p
Intercept	−1.23	0.10	−11.97	<0.0001
Linear	−2.90	0.18	−15.89	<0.0001
Quadratic	6.76	0.21	32.84	<0.0001
Cubic	−3.68	0.20	−18.08	<0.0001
Quartic	0.50	0.17	2.86	0.004
Direction of First Fixation (TF) Intercept	2.20	0.04	57.64	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation (TF) Linear	0.56	0.27	2.05	0.040
Direction of First Fixation (TF) Quadratic	−3.17	0.29	−11.01	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation (TF) Cubic	0.84	0.28	3.03	0.002
Direction of First Fixation (TF) Quartic	0.27	0.20	1.36	0.173
Person (3P) Intercept	−0.08	0.10	−0.83	0.408
Person (3P) Linear	−3.94	0.28	−14.31	<0.0001
Person (3P) Quadratic	1.38	0.31	4.42	<0.0001
Person (3P) Cubic	1.17	0.30	3.85	0.00012
Person (3P) Quartic	−0.55	0.20	−2.77	0.006
Direction of First Fixation x Person Intercept	0.09	0.06	1.69	0.091
Direction of First Fixation x Person Linear	6.83	0.39	17.67	<0.0001
Direction of First Fixation x Person Quadratic	−0.47	0.42	−1.12	0.262
Direction of First Fixation x Person Cubic	−1.68	0.40	−4.17	<0.0001

MF = Match-first.

B.2. Condition comparison models

Table 14.

Match-first model comparisons.

Added effect	χ2	df	p
Condition (Intercept)	57.72	2	<0.0001
Condition (Linear)	250.1	2	<0.0001
Condition (Quadratic)	162.65	2	<0.0001
Condition (Cubic)	32.1	2	<0.0001
Condition (Quartic)	17.96	2	0.0001
Person (Intercept)	0.54	1	0.463
Person (Linear)	163.12	1	<0.0001
Person (Quadratic)	22.03	1	<0.0001
Person (Cubic)	41.94	1	<0.0001
Person (Quartic)	4.81	1	0.028
Condition x Person (Intercept)	2.20	2	0.332
Condition x Person (Linear)	100.43	2	<0.0001
Condition x Person (Quadratic)	2.48	2	0.289
Condition x Person (Cubic)	5.47	2	0.065
Condition x Person (Quartic)	10.6	2	0.005

Table 15.

Parameter estimates for best-fitting match-first model (w.r.t. base: NoDiff condition/1P).

	Est.	SE	z	p
Intercept	0.62	0.13	4.88	<0.0001
Linear	−3.26	0.21	−15.30	<0.0001
Quadratic	5.88	0.22	26.99	<0.0001
Cubic	−2.90	0.20	−14.4	<0.0001
Quartic	0.38	0.19	2.05	0.04
OrthPronDiff Intercept	0.37	0.11	3.41	0.0006
OrthPronDiff Linear	0.85	0.29	2.89	0.003
OrthPronDiff Quadratic	−2.23	0.30	−7.46	<0.0001
OrthPronDiff Cubic	0.06	0.28	0.22	0.82
OrthPronDiff Quartic	0.38	0.26	1.45	0.15
PronDiff Intercept	−0.19	0.11	−1.73	0.08
PronDiff Linear	1.49	0.29	5.22	<0.0001
PronDiff Quadratic	−1.53	0.29	−5.22	<0.0001
PronDiff Cubic	−0.83	0.28	−3.00	0.003
PronDiff Quartic	1.22	0.26	4.73	<0.0001
Person(3P) Intercept	−0.10	0.11	−0.90	0.37
3P Linear	−0.72	0.32	−2.26	0.02
3P Quadratic	0.97	0.33	2.95	0.003
3P Cubic	−1.01	0.30	−3.34	0.0008
3P Quartic	0.40	0.27	1.47	0.14
OrthPronDiff:3P Intercept	0.10	0.16	0.64	0.52
OrthPronDiff:3P Linear	0.16	0.15	1.01	0.31
OrthPronDiff:3P Quadratic	3.67	0.43	8.54	<0.0001
OrthPronDiff:3P Cubic	2.55	0.42	6.06	<0.0001
OrthPronDiff:3P Quartic	0.00	0.44	0.01	0.99
PronDiff:3P Intercept	0.28	0.43	0.65	0.51
PronDiff:3P Linear	0.40	0.41	0.99	0.32
PronDiff:3P Quadratic	−0.24	0.40	−0.58	0.56
PronDiff:3P Cubic	−0.91	0.38	−2.40	0.016
PronDiff:3P Quartic	−1.19	0.37	−3.18	0.001

Table 16.

Non-match-first model comparisons.

Added effect	χ2	df	p
Condition (Intercept)	206.26	2	<0.0001
Condition (Linear)	436.81	2	<0.0001
Condition (Quadratic)	161.46	2	<0.0001
Condition (Cubic)	42.24	2	<0.0001
Condition (Quartic)	22.03	2	<0.0001
Person (Intercept)	0.32	1	0.574
Person (Linear)	31.67	1	<0.0001
Person (Quadratic)	6.58	1	0.010
Person (Cubic)	0.1	1	0.757
Person (Quartic)	9.33	1	0.002
Condition x Person (Intercept)	1.27	2	0.530
Condition x Person (Linear)	230.82	2	<0.0001
Condition x Person (Quadratic)	34.11	2	<0.0001
Condition x Person (Cubic)	20.21	2	<0.0001
Condition x Person (Quartic)	0.039	2	0.981

Table 17.

Parameter estimates for non-match-first model (w.r.t. base: NoDiff condition/1P).

	Est.	SE	z	p
Intercept	0.52	0.13	4.11	<0.0001
Linear	−3.59	0.21	−17.21	<0.0001
Quadratic	5.57	0.21	26.06	<0.0001
Cubic	−2.96	0.20	−14.94	<0.0001
Quartic	0.63	0.15	4.12	<0.0001
Condition/OrthPronDiff Intercept	−1.79	0.13	−13.67	<0.0001
Condition/OrthPronDiff Linear	0.52	0.28	1.88	0.06
Condition/OrthPronDiff Quadratic	1.45	0.30	4.83	<0.0001
Condition/OrthPronDiff Cubic	−0.87	0.29	−3.06	0.002
Condition/OrthPronDiff Quartic	−0.09	0.20	−0.45	0.66
Condition/PronDiff Intercept	−0.35	0.13	−2.70	0.007
Condition/PronDiff Linear	2.21	0.28	7.96	<0.0001
Condition/PronDiff Quadratic	0.52	0.29	1.83	0.07
Condition/PronDiff Cubic	−1.99	0.27	−7.35	<0.0001
Condition/PronDiff Quartic	0.69	0.18	3.81	0.0001
Person(3P) Intercept	0.11	0.13	0.88	0.38
3P Linear	1.43	0.28	5.10	<0.0001
3P Quadratic	0.04	0.29	0.15	0.88
3P Cubic	−0.33	0.27	−1.22	0.22
3P Quartic	−0.61	0.16	−3.93	<0.0001
OrthPronDiff:3P Intercept	−0.18	0.19	−0.96	0.34
OrthPronDiff:3P Linear	−5.43	0.39	−13.91	0.004
OrthPronDiff:3P Quadratic	1.24	0.43	2.92	<0.0001
OrthPronDiff:3P Cubic	1.61	0.40	4.00	<0.0001
PronDiff:3P Intercept	−0.2	0.18	−1.09	0.28
PronDiff:3P Linear	−1.4	0.37	−3.79	0.0002
PronDiff:3P Quadratic	−1.11	0.39	−2.93	0.003
PronDiff:3P Cubic	1.37	0.36	3.79	0.0002