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

Cognitive control, one of the most basic but 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, could produce a remarkable effect in language processing once 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 acquisition, during which certain cognitive resources are highly activated in order to resolve the syntactic ambiguity. There have already been some studies relating cognitive control to garden path sentence comprehension, which underline that different levels of cognitive control of participants may influence their performances on such sentences.  
Constructed on the studies and research in recent a few years, this paper reviews previous studies related to cognitive control and garden path sentence by analyzing the empirical methods as well as experimental results and finds it is almost accepted that individuals with higher cognitive control capacity outperforms than those who possess relatively lower cognitive control ability on the comprehension of garden path sentence. To be more specific, it is reported that the working memory mechanism, as a component of cognitive control, plays a more influential role, proved by the performance from subjects like bilinguals and monolinguals, younger adults and older people etc, whereas inhibition functions as a marginal factor with shifting being absent in leading parser to the right comprehension of garden path sentences.
In conclusion, this literature review summarizes the influence of cognitive control as a whole and its three components including shifting, working memory and inhibition respectively on the garden path sentence comprehension other than language proficiency, which would enhance a better understanding of the role, as well as the functions of cognitive control on garden path sentence resolution.

cognitive control; garden path sentence comprehension; working memory; inhibition