Processing of Reference and the Structure of Language: An Analysis of Complex Noun Phrases

Five experiments used self-paced reading time to examine the ways in which complex noun phrases (both conjoined NPs and possessive NPs) inuence the interpretation of referentially dependent expressions. The experimental conditions contrasted the reading of repeated names and pronouns referring to components of a complex NP and to the entire complex NP. The results indicate that the entity introduced by a major constituent of a sentence is more accessible as a referent than the entities introduced by component noun phrases. This pattern of accessibility departs from the advantage of Žrst mention that has been demonstrated using probe-word recognition tasks. It supports the idea that reduced expressions are interpreted as referring directly to prominent entities in a mental model whereas reference by names to entities that are already represented in a mental model is mediated by additional processes. The same interpretive processes appear to operate on coreference within and between sentences.