Cognitive Control Facilitates Attentional Disengagement during Second Language Comprehension.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psycholinguistics
• Second Language Acquisition

Background:

• Bilingualism is hypothesized to induce long-term cognitive changes due to constant language conflict resolution.
• Understanding how bilinguals manage cognitive control for efficient second language (L2) use, particularly in less proficient speakers, remains underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the real-time influence of cognitive control engagement on L2 sentence comprehension, specifically examining conflict adaptation.
• To compare cognitive-to-language modulations between English monolinguals and L2 English speakers.

Main Methods:

• A cross-task adaptation paradigm was employed, interleaving Stroop tasks with a visual-world paradigm.
• Participants (monolinguals and L2 speakers) processed syntactically ambiguous and unambiguous spoken instructions while eye-movements were tracked.
• Stroop-related conflict was manipulated to assess its impact on language comprehension processes.

Main Results:

• Stroop-induced conflict improved engagement with correct interpretations and disengagement from incorrect ones during ambiguous L2 sentence comprehension, similar in both groups.
• Attentional disengagement modulation occurred earlier in bilinguals than monolinguals, indicating group differences in cognitive control recruitment.
• Working memory capacity influenced eye-movements differently across groups, suggesting both domain-general and language-specific resource involvement.

Conclusions:

• Bilingualism may confer advantages in attentional disengagement following cognitive control, impacting L2 processing.
• Cognitive control recruitment influences L2 sentence comprehension, with bilinguals showing faster disengagement from distractors.
• Individual differences in working memory interact with language background to shape cognitive control mechanisms in L2 comprehension.