Direct impact of cognitive control on sentence processing and comprehension

ABSTRACT

Incremental language processing means that listeners confront temporary ambiguity about how to structure the input, which can generate misinterpretations. In four “visual-world” experiments, we tested whether engaging cognitive control – which detects and resolves conflict – assists revision during comprehension. We recorded listeners’ eye-movements and actions while following instructions that were ripe for misanalysis. In Experiments 1 and 3, sentences followed trials from a nonverbal conflict task that manipulated cognitive-control engagement, to test its impact on the ability to revise. To isolate conflict-driven effects of cognitive-control on comprehension, we manipulated attention in a non-conflict task in Experiments 2 and 4. We observed fewer comprehension errors, and earlier revision, when cognitive control (more than attention) was elicited on an immediately preceding trial. These results extend previous correlations between cognitive control and language processing by revealing the influence of domain-general cognitive-control engagement on the temporal unfolding of error-revision processes during language comprehension.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive control
• language processing
• eye-movements
• comprehension
• conflict resolution

Acknowledgements

We thank Ashley Thomas, Allie Apsley, Emy D’Andrea, Lauren Eisner, Maggie Kelley, Julie Knorr, Brooke Rothman, Karly Schwarz, and Hannah Sichel for assistance with data collection and data coding. We are also grateful to Yi Ting Huang and Albert Kim for helpful discussion and comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

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Disclosure statement

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Notes

1 Although our focus in the current paper is on syntactic ambiguity, we do not intend to suggest that cognitive control is needed for only revision procedures, or when there is processing difficulty. Future research should consider ways in which cognitive control is engaged in a causal way under other language processing conditions at different levels of representation, and to what degree it is (e.g. how cognitive control influences communicative success during joint action and social exchanges).

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by a Research and Scholarship Award (to J.M.N.) from the Graduate School at the University of Maryland, and a National Research Service Award from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (F32-HD080306 to N.S.H.).