Inhibition, prediction and their interaction with cognitive control and working memory in sentence comprehension

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Frank Rösler; Professor Dr. Shravan Vasishth
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 325493514

Background: Central to sentence processing is the continuous generation of semantic and syntactic expectations that are checked against currently encountered evidence. Two areas of research contribute to an understanding of these processes. (1) Research on predictive processing has delineated many behavioral and electroencephalographic phenomena that indicate a mismatch between expectations and evidence. E.g., electroencephelographic (EEG) studies on sentence processing have shown that low-probability sentence continuations cause processing difficulty that becomes manifest in the N400 component. It is also well-established that eye movements in the visual world paradigm can reflect sensitivity to predicted continuations. However, the details how mismatching input is processed and how expectations are modified in the light of new evidence are still unclear. Among others, most of the literature on expectation-based processing ignores the fact that failed prediction may require inhibiting a highly expected alternative. To date, the interaction between expectation and inhibition of semantic and syntactic representations is not well-understood. (2) Previous work has shown that people with more limited working memory capacity and less effective cognitive control are less sensitive to contextual information. These persons may suffer from an imbalance between activation and inhibition of representations or they may have a deficit in the regulation of inhibition.Goals: Our project is the first to address these two issues simultaneously: We propose two visual world eye-tracking and two EEG experiments that investigate the inhibition-prediction interaction. Each of the four experiments will include tests that measure participants' working memory capacity and cognitive control. The planned studies have the potential to uncover the functional mechanisms which cause language comprehension difficulties in people with low working memory capacity and/or low cognitive control.In addition, the mechanisms to be investigated in this project have practical relevance: for example, understanding these mechanisms is a prerequisite for designing focused training programs for persons showing comprehension deficits.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants