Relative Clause Interpretation Preferences in Spanish and English

Abstract

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.