Abstract
Bilinguals learn to resolve conflict between their two languages and that skill has been hypothesized to create long-term adaptive changes in cognitive functioning. Yet, little is known about how bilinguals recruit cognitive control to enable efficient use of one of their languages, especially in the less skilled and more effortful second language (L2). Here we examined how real-time cognitive control engagement influences L2 sentence comprehension (i.e., conflict adaptation). We tested a group of English monolinguals and a group of L2 English speakers using a recently-developed cross-task adaptation paradigm. Stroop sequences were pseudo-randomly interleaved with a visual-world paradigm in which participants were asked to carry out spoken instructions that were either syntactically ambiguous or unambiguous. Consistent with previous research, eye-movement results showed that Stroop-related conflict improved the ability to engage correct-goal interpretations, and disengage incorrect-goal interpretations, during ambiguous instructions. Such cognitive-to-language modulations were similar in both groups, but only in the engagement piece. In the disengagement portion, the modulation emerged earlier in bilinguals than in monolinguals, suggesting group differences in attentional disengagement following cognitive control recruitment. Additionally, incorrect-goal eye-movements were modulated by individual differences in working memory, although differently for each group, suggesting an involvement of both language-specific and domain-general resources.
Highlights
Cognitive control is an essential feature of human cognition that enables appropriate goal-directed behavior through the regulation of basic thoughts and actions [1,2]
For the purposes of the paper, we focus on analyzing eye-movements given that our main interest was to examine how cognitive control affects sentence comprehension in real time
The results reported so far suggest that both bilinguals and monolinguals engaged cognitive control in a similar manner with respect to correct goal fixations, but differed in terms of how control was recruited when fixating on the incorrect goal
Summary
Cognitive control is an essential feature of human cognition that enables appropriate goal-directed behavior through the regulation of basic thoughts and actions [1,2]. The study of cognitive control has become central to our understanding of language processing [3,4,5,6]. A number of lesion studies have established a link between cortical regions considered to be responsible for resolving interference and language abilities [15,16,17,18]. The engagement of such cortical regions has been observed across syntactic and non-syntactic tasks [6,19,20,21], suggesting that at least some of the control processes involved in language are domain-general in nature. There has been an attempt to identify the conditions under which cognitive control is recruited online to facilitate language processing [22,23,24,25,26,27], with the evidence indicating that linguistic
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