Abstract
Recent psycholinguistics research suggests that the executive function (EF) skill known as conflict resolution – the ability to adjust behavior in the service of resolving among incompatible representations – is important for several language processing tasks such as lexical and syntactic ambiguity resolution, verbal fluency, and common-ground assessment. Here, we discuss work showing that various EF skills can be enhanced through consistent practice with working-memory tasks that tap these EFs, and, moreover, that improvements on the training tasks transfer across domains to novel tasks that may rely on shared underlying EFs. These findings have implications for language processing and could launch new research exploring if EF training, within a “process-specific” framework, could be used as a remediation tool for improving general language use. Indeed, work in our lab demonstrates that EF training that increases conflict-resolution processes has selective benefits on an untrained sentence-processing task requiring syntactic ambiguity resolution, which relies on shared conflict-resolution functions. Given claims that conflict-resolution abilities contribute to a range of linguistic skills, EF training targeting this process could theoretically yield wider performance gains beyond garden-path recovery. We offer some hypotheses on the potential benefits of EF training as a component of interventions to mitigate general difficulties in language processing. However, there are caveats to consider as well, which we also address.
Highlights
Cognitive control, called executive function (EF), refers to a cluster of mental processes that permit the flexible adjustment of thoughts and actions across domains, allowing individuals to adapt to new rules and guide the selection of task-relevant over task-irrelevant information in an environment that varies continuously (Miller and Cohen, 2001)
In our training experiment, we argued that the strongest indices of reinterpretation ability and real-time reanalysis respectively were accuracy to comprehension questions gaging lingering effects of misinterpretation and regression-path reading time in disambiguating sentence regions
The ability to make specific predictions for when and where transfer is selectively expected, as well as the conditions under which it is not, will lend important insight to the EFs affected during successful intervention when transfer effects are observed in studies carried out under proper linking assumptions and within a theoretically guided process-specific account
Summary
Called executive function (EF), refers to a cluster of mental processes that permit the flexible adjustment of thoughts and actions across domains, allowing individuals to adapt to new rules and guide the selection of task-relevant over task-irrelevant information in an environment that varies continuously (Miller and Cohen, 2001). The ability to make specific predictions for when and where transfer is selectively expected, as well as the conditions under which it is not, will lend important insight to the EFs affected during successful intervention when transfer effects are observed in studies carried out under proper linking assumptions and within a theoretically guided process-specific account.
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