Pragmatic Constraint on the Interpretation of Complex
Noun Phrases in Spanish and English
Robert Thornton, Maryellen C. MacDonald, and Mariela Gil
University of Southern California
Four experiments examined the role of a pragmatic constraint, the
modifiability of noun phrases (NPs), in the modification of complex
NPs. Experiment 1 demonstrated that NPs that had received relatively
specific prior modification were less likely to take additional
modification than NPs with less specific modification. This effect
obtained in both Spanish and English using two off-line
tasks. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated on-line modifiability effects
for both languages using a self-paced reading task. The results
further suggested that although Spanish and English speakers may have
opposing modification preferences, modifiability constrained their
interpretations in the same direction. The results of Experiment 4
suggested that discrepancies between the off-line results from
Experiment 1 and the on-line results from Experiment 3 may owe to task
differences. Implications are discussed in relation to current models
of sentence processing.
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