When we expect to hear a scalar-modified noun phase (e.g., a large cup), do
we pre-encode the entire phrase or process information as it unfolds? Using
a novel combination of artificial word learning and a visual-world
eye-tracking paradigms, we examine the effects of familiarity of head nouns
on prenominal adjectives. Our results suggest that listeners can
inferentially derive pragmatic interpretations of pre-nominal adjectives
even when their head nouns are less readily available. It supports the
ideas that 1) lexical items are processed as they unfold in the input and
2) pre-encoding of entire referential expressions may not be strictly
necessary.