How domain-general proactive control modulates the processing of English wh-dependencies: An EEG study

Language processing has been hypothesized to engage domain-general cognitive control processes. Studies supporting such an assumption have revealed that performing tasks that engage conflict resolution in an experiment could facilitate the disambiguation of garden-path sentences. While this modulation has typically been found between cognitive inhibition and disambiguation of garden-path sentences, it is unclear whether similar effects occur in other types of cognitive control or sentence structure. To address this, we conducted an EEG study to examine whether and how domain-general proactive control influences the processing of English wh-dependency sentences. We looked into both event-related brain potentials and time-frequency representations in the present study. During the experiment, each participant was asked to do one of the two versions of the AX-continuous performance task (AX-CPT), right after which they performed a sentence reading task containing English wh-dependency sentences. Participants were grouped based on the version of the AX-CPT they performed and different versions of the AX-CPT varied in the demand on proactive control. Seventy functionally monolingual and neurologically healthy native English speakers without any reading disorder participated in the study. Our results confirmed that the AX-CPT successfully induced different levels of proactive control across groups. Importantly, we found evidence for a modulatory effect between domain-general proactive control and language-specific processing under our experimental manipulations. This finding suggests that domain-general proactive control and language-specific processing may share overlapping neural mechanisms, and that changes in proactive control levels can influence language-specific processing.