Title: "Dynamic behavioral and neural effects of cognitive control on language processing"
Speaker: Nina Hsu, UMD HESP
Date: April 8, 12-1pm
Room: LeFrak Hall Room 0135
Abstract:
An important consequence of incremental language processing is that listeners frequently confront temporary ambiguities about how to structure the input in real time. Though various linguistic and extra-linguistic cues rapidly constrain initial interpretations, listeners’ early commitments sometimes turn out wrong and must be revised when other evidence conflicts with a developing analysis. How do listeners modify parsing decisions and revise misinterpretations? One proposal claims that general-purpose cognitive control procedures (primarily mediated by frontal brain regions) detect and resolve information-conflict through flexible behavioral adjustments while similarly enabling syntactic ambiguity resolution. In this talk, I will present two studies. The first experiment examines the neural mechanisms underlying these general-purpose cognitive control procedures. We find evidence that a left prefrontal "hub" is recruited when people handle conflicting information across syntactic and non-syntactic domains, but that this "hub" co-engages with distinct brain networks according to task-specific demands. Though compelling and suggestive of shared cognitive control procedures between syntactic and non-syntactic domains, these findings do not shed light on the mechanisms underlying syntactic ambiguity resolution. To address this issue, the second experiment utilizes conflict adaptation and an eye-tracking paradigm to examine the dynamic effects of cognitive control engagement on sentence parsing and interpretation. We find that relative cognitive control engagement facilitates earlier recovery from misinterpretation. Together, these findings demonstrate a dynamic behavioral and neural interplay of cognitive control procedures across syntactic and non-syntactic domains.
