Gilboy E, Sopena J M, Clifton C, Frazier L
Department de Psicologia Bàsica, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.
Cognition. 1995 Feb;54(2):131-67. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(94)00636-y.
Three questionnaire studies investigated Spanish and English readers' interpretations of sentences with complex noun phrases (NPs) such as "I really liked the preface of the book that I read yesterday." These complex NPs are ambiguous 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 construction 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 advance 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 structural parsing principles are specific to only certain classes of phrases within a language.
三项问卷调查研究考察了西班牙语和英语读者对包含复杂名词短语（NP）的句子的理解，例如“我真的很喜欢我昨天读的那本书的前言”。这些复杂名词短语在两种解读之间存在歧义，一种解读是定语从句“我昨天读的”修饰第一个名词N1（前言），另一种解读是修饰第二个名词N2（书）。奎托斯和米切尔（《认知》，1988年，第30卷，第73 - 105页）声称，西班牙语倾向于让定语从句修饰N1，他们认为这是反对晚期封闭解析原则跨语言普遍性的证据。我们证明，在西班牙语和英语中，不同结构类型之间对N1与N2修饰的偏好差异很大，而语言之间的差异相对较小，但仍然值得关注。这种效应不能归结为合理性效应，而是似乎直接反映了所研究结构的某些句法和语义方面。我们认为，定语从句和其他“非主要”短语并非按照晚期封闭等解析原则进行解析，而是遵循我们以解释假设形式提出的原则。因此，晚期封闭并非特定于某一种语言的策略；相反，它以及类似的结构解析原则仅特定于一种语言中的某些短语类别。
