What is it about?
In general, it is more difficult to comprehend sentences with grammatical ambiguities. In order to resolve such ambiguities attentional and cognitive control processed are required. If that hypothesis is correct, it may be expected that comprehension of such sentences would be further impaired if people reading such sentences would have to perform an attention demanding task during reading of the ambiguous part of the sentence but not when reading another part of the sentence. Eye movements were tracked and when the eyes started fixated the critical part of the sentence a high or low tone was presented that required speeded categorisation as high or low.
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Why is it important?
Such experiments are important to decide between two views of grammatical processing in sentence comprehension. According to one view, grammatical parsing is an automatic process that can run off without any need for attentional control, whereas another view assumes that such automatic processing needs attentional support to resolve ambiguities in the grammar of the sentence.
Perspectives
In a previous study (Loncke et al., 2011) we have already shown that comprehension of sentences containing grammatical ambiguities or more complex grammatical structure is impaired when simultaneously attention-demanding tasks have to be performed in comparison to condition where a simultaneous task requires much less attention. The methodology used in that study did not allow to focus on specific sentence parts. In the present study the attention-demanding task was executed during one of two potentially critical areas. This way it could be shown that more attention is only required during parsing of the ambiguous sentence parts.
Professor Andre Vandierendonck
Ghent University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Role of Executive Control in Resolving Grammatical Number Conflict in Sentence Comprehension, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, January 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2016.1276610.
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