Transferable Modulation of Cognitive Control: The Cross-Task Role of Conflict Adaptation in Thematic Roles Assignment in Chinese

TL;DR

This study shows that cognitive control from non-linguistic tasks influences how Chinese speakers process sentence meaning in real time.

Contribution

It demonstrates cross-task conflict adaptation effects on thematic role assignment using eye-tracking in Chinese.

Findings

Conflict tasks trigger cross-task adaptation, speeding up syntactic processing after conflict trials.

More complex Stroop tasks lead to earlier cognitive adaptation during sentence comprehension.

Eye-tracking reveals reduced regression behaviors following conflict trials in incongruent sentences.

Abstract

Conflict adaptation reflects the dynamic modulation of information processing by the cognitive control system following conflict detection. A central question in language processing research concerns whether control elicited by non-linguistic tasks generalizes across tasks to influence higher-order processes such as sentence comprehension. The present study employed color-word Stroop tasks of varying complexity and, in conjunction with eye-tracking technology, examined their cross-task regulatory effects of conflict adaptation on thematic role assignment in Chinese. Across two experiments, participants read sentences containing either congruent or conflicting thematic roles following Stroop trials with congruent or incongruent stimuli. The temporal dynamics of syntactic processing were captured via eye movement measures. Results indicated that both conflict tasks triggered cross-task conflict adaptation, as evidenced by accelerated syntactic processing and reduced regression behaviors when thematically incongruent sentences followed conflict trials. Notably, the more complex color-word Stroop task imposed greater demands on cognitive control resources and elicited earlier cognitive adaptation effects during comprehension. Theoretically, these findings extend conflict monitoring theory to the domain of language processing, demonstrating that cognitive control mechanisms contribute to real-time syntactic parsing. Methodologically, the use of eye-tracking to examine thematic role assignment provides fine-grained empirical evidence for the interaction between domain-general control and language-specific processing.

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