RESUMO
Understanding language requires readers and listeners to cull meaning from fast-unfolding messages that often contain conflicting cues pointing to incompatible ways of interpreting the input (e.g., "The cat was chased by the mouse"). This article reviews mounting evidence from multiple methods demonstrating that cognitive control plays an essential role in resolving conflict during language comprehension. How does cognitive control accomplish this task? Psycholinguistic proposals have conspicuously failed to address this question. We introduce an account in which cognitive control aids language processing when cues conflict by sending top-down biasing signals that strengthen the interpretation supported by the most reliable evidence available. We also provide a computationally plausible model that solves the critical problem of how cognitive control "knows" which way to direct its biasing signal by allowing linguistic knowledge itself to issue crucial guidance. Such a mental architecture can explain a range of experimental findings, including how moment-to-moment shifts in cognitive-control state-its level of activity within a person-directly impact how quickly and successfully language comprehension is achieved.
RESUMO
Comprehenders have been shown to use both syntactic and semantic cues to understand pronouns like he and she. In Ana threw the ball to Liz. She , there is a syntactic bias to assign "she" to the previous subject (Ana), and a semantic bias to assign it to the goal referent (Liz). How do people learn these biases? We tested how sensitivity to these cues is modulated by linguistic experience, measured with an Author Recognition Task (Stanovich & West, 1989). In two experiments, we found both the subject and goal biases overall, but higher print exposure only predicted use of the subject bias, not the goal bias. Our results suggest that the subject bias, and not the goal bias, may be learned from exposure.