AN INVESTIGATION OF LATE CLOSURE : THE ROLE OF SYNTAX, THEMATIC STRUCTURE,AND PRAGMATICS IN INITIAL AND FINAL INTERPRETATION

Four reading-time experiments investigated the application of the late closure principle in Italian. The experiments tested the principle governing the initial attachment of different types of modifiers (relative clause, adjectival phrase, and prepositional phrase) to a complex noun phrase. By manipulating the type of preposition within the complex noun phrase, the authors investigated the role of the thematic structure in initial and final parsing. The results show that the late closure principle applies to initial parsing in Italian without being affected by the thematic structure of the complex noun phrase. Final interpretation, however, shows an effect of pragmatic preference and an effect of thematic structure on syntactic revisions. The results are discussed in terms of a parsing model that adopts syntactic parsing strategies and makes modular use of linguistic information. The purpose of this research was to assess whether late closure, an assumed universal sentence parsing principle (Frazier, 1978), applies in Italian. In this article we study the attachment of different types of modifiers to complex noun phrases, drawing a distinction between initial and final interpretation and trying to identify what variables (syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic) affect what stage in the comprehension process. The results of four on-line experiments conducted in Italian are presented. Kimball (1973) and Frazier and Fodor (1978) proposed strategies that apply to the initial parsing of a sentence as soon as each word is perceived. Some examples of such strategies are right association (Kimball, 1973), minimal attachment and late closure (Frazier & Fodor, 1978), superstrategy (Fodor, 1979), recent filler strategy (Frazier, Clifton, & Randall, 1983), active filler strategy (Frazier, 1987), and the minimal chain principle (De Vincenzi, 1991). The basic idea in all of these strategies is that they are directly derived from a simple principle: Choose to do whatever costs the least effort in terms of computation to interpret the incoming linguistic input before it decays. This choice is motivated by a basic cognitive reason, namely, the restrictions on short-term memory in terms of memory and computational space and the fact that