Domain-specific executive control and the revision of misinterpretations in sentence comprehension

Abstract

Two individual differences experiments examined the relationship between executive control and the revision of misinterpretations in sentence comprehension. Garden-path sentences were used as they often lead to initial misinterpretations, necessitating revision during comprehension. In addition to garden-path revision, verbal and non-verbal executive controls were assessed by using the verbal and non-verbal version of the Stroop task. Experiment 1 showed that garden-path revision errors in a grammaticality judgement task correlated with verbal Stroop interference errors. Experiment 2 further showed that the time taken to revise the garden-path interpretation correlated with the time taken to resolve verbal Stroop interference, but not with the time taken to resolve non-verbal Stroop interference. Together, the results argue for a role of executive control, which is possibly domain-specific, in the revision of misinterpretations during sentence comprehension.

Keywords:

• sentence comprehension
• garden-path recovery
• executive control
• domain specificity

Acknowledgements

We thank Catherine Johnston and Elaine Mahoney for help with data collection. We also thank Gareth Gaskell and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the paper. LC Vuong is now at the Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR.

Notes

1. Materials for this task were provided by Akira Miyake (University of Colorado, Boulder).

2. Recall that our reading time data, on which the correlations were based, included only correct trials. It should be noted, however, that the accuracy data were not very sensitive to the experimental manipulations as only a main effect of consistency was obtained and the garden-path effect was only marginal both by subjects and items. The lack of sensitivity may have resulted because an intransitive response (e.g. ‘The man coached’) would not necessarily rule out the possibility that the comprehender had inferred the subject noun as the direct object of the subordinate verb – e.g. ‘The man coached’ would be an appropriate response even if the subject had made the unwarranted inference that the man coached the woman.

Additional information

Funding

Funding This work was supported by an APA Dissertation Research Award to Loan Vuong.