Carreiras M, Clifton C
Departamento de Psicologia Cognitiva, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.
Lang Speech. 1993 Oct-Dec;36 ( Pt 4):353-72. doi: 10.1177/002383099303600401.
Five experiments measured reading time for Spanish and English sentences containing a complex NP followed by a relative clause (e.g., ... "the daughter of the colonel who had an accident"). As has been previously reported, Spanish sentences were read more rapidly when the content of the relative clause forced it to modify the first of the two NPs in the complex NP ("the daughter") than when it modified the second NP ("the colonel"). Their English translations showed no difference in reading time. This preference to take the first noun as a host for the relative clause in Spanish occurred whether the relative clause was disambiguated by morphological gender marking or by its content. The results are generally consistent with the claim that the Late Closure parsing strategy does not apply universally across languages. However, we propose an alternative hypothesis, namely, that the Late Closure parsing strategy fails to apply across all phrase types within a language, and applies to relative clauses in neither English nor Spanish. Instead, a different principle, which we term the "construal hypothesis", accounts for processing of phrases such as relative clauses which do not play the role of a "primary relation" within a sentence.
五项实验测量了包含复杂名词短语（NP）后跟关系从句的西班牙语和英语句子的阅读时间（例如，……“出事故的上校的女儿”）。正如之前所报道的，当关系从句的内容迫使它修饰复杂名词短语中的两个名词短语中的第一个（“女儿”）时，西班牙语句子的阅读速度比修饰第二个名词短语（“上校”）时更快。它们的英文译文在阅读时间上没有差异。在西班牙语中，无论关系从句是通过形态性性别标记还是其内容消除歧义，都倾向于将第一个名词作为关系从句的宿主。这些结果总体上与“迟关闭”解析策略并非普遍适用于所有语言的观点一致。然而，我们提出了另一种假设，即“迟关闭”解析策略未能适用于一种语言中的所有短语类型，并且在英语和西班牙语中都不适用于关系从句。相反，一个不同的原则，我们称之为“解释假设”，解释了诸如关系从句之类在句子中不充当“主要关系”角色的短语的处理过程。
