Pragmatic Constraint on the Interpretation of Complex Noun Phrases in Spanish and English

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 was obtained in both Spanish and English using 2 off-line tasks. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated on-line modifiability effects for both languages using a self-paced reading task. The results further suggest that although Spanish and English speakers may have opposing modification preferences, modifiability constrained their interpretations in the same direction. The results of Experiment 4 suggest that discrepancies between the off-line results from Experiment 1 and the on-line results from Experiment 3 may be due to task differences. Implications are discussed in relation to current models of sentence processing.