Effect of Executive Control and Syntactic Structure on Sentence Processing

Executive control has been hypothesized to be central to several cognitive and perceptual mechanisms. Language comprehension being one of the complex cognitive processes demands substantial resources. Yet, literature remains largely unclear about the interplay of executive control and syntactic structure. Scrambling hypothesis states that syntactically incorrect sentences put up higher processing cost whereas distance locality hypothesis (DLT) defines the distance between subject and verb to be detrimental to processing cost. Therefore, working on these theoretical differences the present study was formulated to study the dynamics of executive control and syntactic structure in Hindi language. Findings revealed advantage of non canonical word order over canonical word order. Also, participants with high executive control performed better for SOV and SVO syntactic structures in comparison to participants with low executive control. Therefore, executive control plays significant role in sentence processing in terms with syntactic structure. Also, DLT was justified for sentence processing for Hindi language.