Accounting for Variation Across Languages: A Constraint-Based Perspective

Much of the research on sentence processing has focused on discovering universal principles to explain parsing preferences. Recent cross-linguistic work, however, suggests that processing is sensitive to distributional information about individual languages. Along these lines, we explore a constraint-based approach to processing, in which cross-linguistic variation is explained by the interaction of language specific grammatical constraints with more general pragmatic principles. Specifically, we examine the role of pragmatic information in constraining the modification of complex noun phrases in English and Spanish. We first present data suggesting that, for both languages, initial comprehension is constrained in the same manner by pragmatic information. We then pursue an explanation of crosslinguistic differences in terms of pragmatic constraints on grammatical differences between the languages.