Theta-band neural oscillations reflect cognitive control during language processing.

As we interpret language moment by moment, we often encounter conflicting cues in the input that create incompatible representations of sentence meaning, which must be promptly resolved. Although ample evidence suggests that cognitive control aids in the resolution of such conflict, the methods commonly used to assess cognitive control's involvement in language comprehension provide limited information about the time course of its engagement. Here, we show that neural oscillatory activity in the theta-band (∼3-8 Hz), which is associated with cognitive control in nonlinguistic tasks like Stroop and Flanker, provides a real-time index of cognitive control during language processing. We conducted time-frequency analyses of four electroencephalogram data sets, and consistently observed that increased theta-band power was elicited by various kinds of linguistic conflict. Moreover, increases in the degree of conflict within a sentence produced greater increases in theta activity. These effects emerged as early as 300 ms from the onset of the initiating event, indicating rapid cognitive-control recruitment during sentence processing in response to conflicting representations. Crucially, the effect patterns could not be ascribed to processing difficulty that is not due to conflict (e.g., semantic implausibility was neither necessary nor sufficient to elicit theta activity). We suggest that neural oscillations in the theta-band offer a reliable way to test specific hypotheses about cognitive-control engagement during real-time language comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The State of Cognitive Control in Language Processing.

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.

Print exposure explains individual differences in using syntactic but not semantic cues for pronoun comprehension.

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.