Processing of Reference and the Structure of Language: An Analysis of Complex Noun Phrases Peter C. Gordon, Randall Hendrick, Kerry Ledoux and Chin Lung Yang University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA 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 rst 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. INTRODUCTION Communication through language involves sharing some part of our subjective world with others. This intuition is expressed theoretically in work on mental models (Johnson-Laird, 1983) which describes many aspects of cognition as consisting of operations on subjective worlds that Requests for reprints should be sent to Peter C. Gordon, Department of Psychology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB# 3270, Davie Hall, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599– 3270, USA. Email: pcg@email.unc.edu The research reported here was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SBR–9807028). We thank Lee James for help with various aspects of the project. c 1999 Psychology Press Ltd LANGUAGE AND COGNITIVE PROCESSES, 1999, 14 (4), 353–379