Pragmatic constraint on the interpretation of complex noun phrases in Spanish and English

Four experiments examined the role of a pragmatic constraint, the modifiabi lity of noun phrases (NPs), in the modification of complex NPs. Experiment 1 demonstrated that NPs that had received relatively specific prior modific ation were less likely to take additional modification than NPs with less s pecific modification. This effect was obtained in both Spanish and English using 2 off-line tasks. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated on-line modifiabil ity effects for both languages using a self-paced reading task. The results further suggest that although Spanish and English speakers may have opposi ng modification preferences, modifiability constrained their interpretation s in the same direction. The results of Experiment 4 suggest that discrepan cies between the off-line results from Experiment 1 and the on-line results from Experiment 3 may be due to task differences. Implications are discuss ed in relation to current models of sentence processing.