Domain-specific executive control and the revision of misinterpretations in sentence comprehension

Two individual differences experiments examined the relationship between executive control and the revision of misinterpretations in sentence comprehension. Garden-path sentences were used as they often lead to initial misinterpretations, necessitating revision during comprehension. In addition to garden-path revision, verbal and non-verbal executive controls were assessed by using the verbal and non-verbal version of the Stroop task. Experiment 1 showed that garden-path revision errors in a grammaticality judgement task correlated with verbal Stroop interference errors. Experiment 2 further showed that the time taken to revise the garden-path interpretation correlated with the time taken to resolve verbal Stroop interference, but not with the time taken to resolve non-verbal Stroop interference. Together, the results argue for a role of executive control, which is possibly domain-specific, in the revision of misinterpretations during sentence comprehension.