As we interpret language moment by moment, we often encounter conflicting cues in the input that create incompatible representations of sentence meaning, which must be promptly resolved. Although ample evidence suggests that cognitive control aids in the resolution of such conflict, the methods commonly used to assess cognitive control's involvement in language comprehension provide limited information about the time course of its engagement. Here, we show that neural oscillatory activity in the theta-band (∼3-8 Hz), which is associated with cognitive control in nonlinguistic tasks like Stroop and Flanker, provides a real-time index of cognitive control during language processing. We conducted time-frequency analyses of four electroencephalogram data sets, and consistently observed that increased theta-band power was elicited by various kinds of linguistic conflict. Moreover, increases in the degree of conflict within a sentence produced greater increases in theta activity. These effects emerged as early as 300 ms from the onset of the initiating event, indicating rapid cognitive-control recruitment during sentence processing in response to conflicting representations. Crucially, the effect patterns could not be ascribed to processing difficulty that is not due to conflict (e.g., semantic implausibility was neither necessary nor sufficient to elicit theta activity). We suggest that neural oscillations in the theta-band offer a reliable way to test specific hypotheses about cognitive-control engagement during real-time language comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

---

Theta带神经振荡反映了语言处理过程中的认知控制。


当我们时时刻刻解释语言时，我们经常会在输入中遇到相互冲突的线索，这些线索会产生不兼容的句子含义表示，必须立即解决。尽管大量证据表明认知控制有助于解决此类冲突，但通常用于评估认知控制参与语言理解的方法提供的有关其参与时间过程的信息有限。在这里，我们表明，theta 频段（∼3-8 Hz）的神经振荡活动与 Stroop 和 Flanker 等非语言任务中的认知控制相关，提供了语言处理过程中认知控制的实时指数。我们对四个脑电图数据集进行了时频分析，并一致观察到各种语言冲突引起了 θ 波段功率的增加。此外，句子内冲突程度的增加会导致 theta 活动的更大增加。这些效应早在起始事件发生后 300 毫秒就出现了，表明在句子处理过程中为了响应相互冲突的表征而快速招募认知控制。至关重要的是，效果模式不能归因于非冲突引起的处理困难（例如，语义上的不可信性对于引发 theta 活动既不是必要的也不是充分的）。我们认为，theta 波段的神经振荡提供了一种可靠的方法来测试有关实时语言理解过程中认知控制参与的特定假设。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。