Clearing the garden-path: improving sentence processing through cognitive control training

Novick, Jared M.; Hussey, Erika; Teubner‐Rhodes, Susan; Harbison, J. Isaiah; Bunting, Michael F.

doi:10.1080/01690965.2012.758297

Cited by 131 publications

(129 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…They fit nicely within the growing evidence in the adult literature—including individual differences studies (Mendelssohn 2002; Vuong & Martin, 2014), training studies (Novick et al, 2014), neuro-imaging (January et al, 2009), and neuropsychological case studies (Novick et al, 2009)—that EF abilities support revision of sentence interpretation.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 70%

“…In addition, consistent with the existence of a causal relation between EF skills and garden-path recovery, training of EF skills has been found to be selectively linked to improvements in garden-path recovery in adult native speakers. A recent study by Novick and colleagues (2014) found that training-related improvements on an N-back task with lures (an EF measure targeting conflict-resolution) positively correlated with improvements in processing garden-path sentences, as measured by eye-tracking and offline accuracy scores.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners

Woodard

Pozzan

Trueswell

2016

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

101

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Children as old as five to six years of age display selective difficulties revising initial interpretive commitments, as indicated by both online and offline measures of sentence comprehension (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill & Logrip, 1999). It is likely though that individual children differ in how well they can recover from misinterpretations and at the age they become adult-like in these abilities. To better understand the cognitive functions that support sentence processing and revision, the present work investigates how individual differences in children’s ability to interpret temporarily ambiguous sentences relate to individual differences in other linguistic and domain-general cognitive abilities. Children were tested over two days on a battery of executive function, working memory, and language comprehension tasks. Performance on these tasks was then used to predict online and offline measures of children’s ability to revise initial misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous sentences. We found two measures of children’s cognitive flexibility to be related to their ambiguity resolution abilities. These results provide converging evidence for the hypothesis that the ability to revise initial interpretative commitments is supported by domain-general executive function (EF) abilities (Novick, Trueswell & Thompson-Schill, 2005), which are highly variable and not fully developed in children (Anderson 2002; Davidson, Amso, Anderson & Diamond, 2006).

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 70%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners

Woodard

Pozzan

Trueswell

2016

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

101

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“…With respect to the latter, some recent studies have suggested that cognitive benefits that result from prolonged training of cognitive control/conflict resolution skills might have a beneficial effect on the processing of complex sentences, such as garden-path sentences and structures that require inhibition of preferred processing strategies in both native speakers and child second language learners (for adults, see Novick, Hussey, Teubner-Rhodes, Harbison, & Bunting, 2014; for child L2 learners, see Pozzan, Woodard, & Trueswell, 2014). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revise and resubmit: How real-time parsing limitations influence grammar acquisition

Pozzan

Trueswell

2015

Cognitive Psychology

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We present the results from a three-day artificial language learning study on adults. The study examined whether sentence-parsing limitations, in particular, difficulties revising initial syntactic/semantic commitments during comprehension, shape learners’ ability to acquire a language. Findings show that both comprehension and production of morphology pertaining to sentence argument structure are delayed when this morphology consistently appears at the end, rather than at the beginning, of sentences in otherwise identical grammatical systems. This suggests that real-time processing constraints impact acquisition; morphological cues that tend to guide linguistic analyses are easier to learn than cues that revise these analyses. Parallel performance in production and comprehension indicates that parsing constraints affect grammatical acquisition, not just real-time commitments. Properties of the linguistic system (e.g., ordering of cues within a sentence) interact with the properties of the cognitive system (cognitive control and conflict-resolution abilities) and together affect language acquisition.

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“…Since it is assumed that linguistic representations compete during both comprehension and production, it should not be surprising that IDs in EFs predict many aspects of language processing. For example, they predict performance on recovery from garden-path sentences in both adults [96,97] and children [98]; interference from locally coherent but globally inappropriate lexical items during sentence processing [99]; pragmatic comprehension and production [100]; lexical ambiguity resolution in children [101]; and interference across languages in bilingual speakers [102].…”

Section: Relationships Between Linguistic and Cognitive Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual Differences in Language Acquisition and Processing

Kidd

Donnelly

Christiansen³

2018

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

353

231

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Clearing the garden-path: improving sentence processing through cognitive control training

Cited by 131 publications

References 79 publications

Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners

Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners

Revise and resubmit: How real-time parsing limitations influence grammar acquisition

Individual Differences in Language Acquisition and Processing

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