Direct impact of cognitive control on sentence processing and comprehension

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.