Readers with less cognitive control are more affected by surprising content: Evidence from a self-paced reading experiment in German

A mechanism of predictions for language implies that the parser has to build up potential upcoming continuations and then evaluate them given the evidence. We show that the difficulty produced by the mismatch between the actual continuation and the predictions is modulated by cognitive control as measured by a modification of the Stroop task. We ran a self-paced reading task in German using a paradigm similar to the one from DeLong et al. (2005) and Van Berkum et al (2005). Our results show a larger slowdown for readers with less cognitive control while reading surprising content. The results suggest that cognitive control modulates the ability to suppress irrelevant predictions.