Argument structure and association preferences in Spanish and English complex NPs

Three questionnaire studies investigated Spanish and English readersʹ interpretations of sentences with complex noun phrases (NPs) such as “I really liked the preface of the bookk that I read yesterday.”. These complex NPs are ambigous between two readings, one in which the relative clause (RC) that I read yesterday modifies the first noun, N1, preface, or the second noun. N2, book. Cuetos and Mitchell (Cognition, 1988, 30, 73–105) claimed that Spanish was biased toward having the RC modify N1, which they claimed was evidence against the cross-language universality of the late closure parsing principle. We demonstrate that the preference for N1 versus N2 modification varies greatly between different contruction types within both Spanish and English while the variation between languages is relatively minor, but still of interest. The effect cannot be reduced to an effect of plausibility, but seems to reflect directly certain syntactic and semantic aspects of the constructions studied. We claim that relative clauses and other “nonprimary” phrases are not parsed following such parsing principles as late closure, but instead follow principles we advanced in the form of the construal hypothesis. Thus, it is not the case that late closure is a language-specific strategy; rather, it and similar sstuctural parsing principles are specific to only certain classes of phrases within a language.