EXPRESS: Cognitive Control Mechanisms in Language Processing: Are there both Within- and Across-Task Conflict Adaptation Effects?

Cognitive conflict is regarded as a crucial factor in triggering subsequent adjustments in cognitive control (Botvinick et al., 2001). Recent studies have suggested that the implementation of control following conflict detection might be domain-general in that conflict experienced in the language domain recruits control processes that deal with conflict experienced in non-linguistic domains (e.g., Kan et al., 2013). During language comprehension, humans often have to recover from conflicting interpretations as quickly and accurately as possible. In the present study, we investigate how people adapt to conflict experienced during processing semantically ambiguous sentences. Experiments 1-3 investigated whether such semantic conflict produces the congruency sequence effect (CSE) within a subsequent manual Stroop task and whether Stroop conflict leads to adjustments in semantic processing. Experiments 4-6 investigated whether semantic conflict results in conflict adaptation in subsequent sentence processing. Although processing conflict was consistently experienced during sentence reading and in the Stroop task, we did not observe any within-task or cross-task adaptation effects. Specifically, there were no cross-task CSEs from the linguistic task to the Stroop task and vice versa (Experiment 1-3) – speaking against the assumption of domain-general control mechanisms. Moreover, experiencing conflict within a semantically ambiguous sentence did not ease the processing of a subsequent ambiguous sentence (Experiment 4-6). Implications of these findings will be discussed.