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Divergent sentence processing strategies following mild traumatic brain injury: evidence from pupillometry

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Addison Vogt¹ (), Ileana Ratiu², Arianna LaCroix¹; ¹Purdue University, ²Arizona State University

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is often characterized by transient cognitive deficits, yet emerging evidence suggests that sentence comprehension is also affected. Understanding how listeners process sentences when cognitive resources are limited has led to two prominent models of sentence comprehension. The Resource Reduction model proposes that listeners compensate for reduced resources by exerting greater effort, whereas the Good-Enough model suggests reliance on heuristic or shallow interpretations to conserve effort. The present study examined how cognitive capacity influences the use of these processing strategies in individuals with and without a history of mTBI. Cognitive effort during accurate sentence comprehension was measured using pupillometry, where greater pupil dilation indicates increased cognitive effort. Participants also completed assessments of alerting, orienting, and executive control attention, as well as working memory. Among neurotypical controls, individuals with weaker alerting attention showed greater pupil dilation than those with stronger alerting ability, indicating increased effort to prepare for incoming information, which is consistent with the Resource Reduction model. In contrast, pupil dilation did not vary by cognitive capacity within the mTBI group. This pattern aligns with the Good-Enough hypothesis, suggesting that individuals with mTBI may rely on shallow or heuristic sentence interpretations rather than engaging in resource-intensive syntactic processing when cognitive capacity is limited. Overall, these findings indicate that mTBI may change how individuals engage language processing strategies, shedding light on the mechanisms underlying sentence comprehension impairments following brain injury.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other