The 9th International Conference on English Language Teaching (ELT) In China (ELT2020)

509 / 2020-03-17 20:40:56

Cognitive Control and Garden Path Sentence Comprehension

cognitive control, garden path sentence, second language comprehension

Psycholinguistics > Psycholinguistics

Cognitive control, one of the most significant abilities for human beings, physically and psychologically, is meaningful to restrain the first reaction of human race as well as inner thoughts in daily activities, and most importantly, producing a remarkable effect in language processing confronted with contradictory situation like ambiguity resolution. Speaking of which, the understanding of garden path sentences has always been a popular topic in second language learning. There have already been some studies relating cognitive control to garden path sentence comprehension, which underlined that different levels of cognitive control of participants may influence their performances on such sentences. The research investigating cognitive control and garden path sentence is not only popular in language learning, but also still flourishing in domains like bilingual advantages and clinical applications.

Constructed on the studies and research in recent a few years, this paper will critically summarize the major findings of cognitive control and garden path sentence comprehension after introducing those two concepts by theories as well as examples. In addition, studies on the crucial components like working memory together with inhibition on the comprehension of garden path sentences would also be presented. By providing the previous findings in this domain, this paper would be meaningful for better understanding of cognitive control mechanism on the comprehension of such sentence conflict-resolving tasks.