The influence of language dominance and domain-general executive control on semantic context effects

Prepotent task-irrelevant semantic information is dampened by domain-specific control mechanisms during visual word recognition

“…To reach this aim, we adopted a cross-task correlational approach and tested correlations between semantic interference effects arising during visual word recognition with both (a) a non-semantic conflict effect (the Simon effect) and (b) a semantic interference effect (the semantic Stroop effect). The cross-task correlational approach is widely used to investigate both similarities and differences across different functions in the executive domain (e.g., Fan et al, 2003;Spagna et al, 2015;Stins et al, 2005), as well as the involvement of executive control in language processing (e.g., Boned et al, 2021;Crowther & Martin, 2014;Korko et al, 2021). The use of this approach thus makes our results directly comparable with the extant literature.…”

“…This proposal calls for additional research. Although the correlational approach is widely used in the literature to assess the role of executive control in language processing (e.g., Boned et al, 2021;Crowther & Martin, 2014;Korko et al, 2021), it comes with notable limitations, as correlations might surface due to unidentified factors shared across tasks. Albeit in our data this concern may be mitigated by the selectivity of the reported correlations, which consistently involved only semantically driven effects, future studies may further attempt to directly manipulate the overlap between the semantic dimension triggering the interference and the one that is relevant for the task goals, to assess corresponding variations in the implementation of (semantic) control mechanisms.…”