Investigating the relationship between individual differences and island sensitivity

Abstract

It is well-attested that native speakers tend to give low acceptability ratings to sentences that involve movement from within islands, but the source of island effects remains controversial. The grammatical account posits that island effects result from syntactic constraints on whmovement, whereas the resource-limitation view posits that low ratings emerge due to processing-related constraints on the parser, such that islands themselves present processing bottlenecks. We address this debate by investigating the relationship between island sensitivity and individual differences in cognitive abilities, as it has been argued that the two views make distinct predictions regarding whether a relationship should hold. Building directly on Sprouse et al. (2012a), we tested 102 native English speakers on four island types (whether, complex NP, subject, and adjunct islands) using an acceptability judgment task to quantify island sensitivity and three cognitive tasks to capture individual differences in working memory (via reading and counting span tasks) and attentional control (via a number Stroop task). Our results reveal strong island sensitivity effects across all island types. However, we did not find evidence that individual differences in working memory and attentional control modulated island sensitivity, which runs counter to the resource-limitation view (Kluender & Kutas 1993). These results are in line with grammatical accounts of island effects rather than due to processing difficulties.

Examining the source of island effects in native speakers and second language learners of English

“…As noted by Szabolcsi (2006), there is some variation within English natives with respect to the acceptability of extractions from wh-islands (for work on Norwegian, see also Kush et al, 2018). The variability observed in the native English speakers in the present study is in line with other studies, such as Johnson and Newport (1991), Martohardjono (1993) and Pham et al (2020). In our study, both natives and Najdi Arabic learners may have been even more likely to accept the whether islands because the wh-filler phrase that we include in the stimuli is a complex or discourselinked wh-phrase, which arguably dilutes the effects of islands (Pesetsky, 1987;Rizzi, 1990).…”

“…These results contribute to a recent body of crosslinguistic evidence supporting the grammatical account of islands in native speakers (e.g. Kush et al, 2018, 2019; Pham et al, 2020; Sprouse et al, 2016; Yoshida et al, 2014).…”

“…However, the Bayes factor for this regression indicated that there was insufficient evidence to support the null hypothesis. Thus, for the L2 learners, the grammatical account of islands is most strongly supported by the results for the complex NP, subject, and adjunct islands, a pattern also observed by Pham et al (2020) for English native speakers.…”

“…The third criticism was that the serialrecall and n-back tasks chosen by Sprouse and colleagues may not be appropriate measures of WM capacity. A study conducted in our own lab, Pham et al (2020), addressed the methodological criticisms raised by Hofmeister et al (2012aHofmeister et al ( , 2012b and examined island sensitivity in a large-scale study of English native speakers. The results supported the initial argument of Sprouse et al (2012a), revealing no significant relationship between cognitive abilities and island sensitivity.…”

The real-time status of strong and weak islands

“…The first way in which they are distinguished is that strong islands give rise to a greater sense of unacceptability than weak islands. There is some experimental evidence for this: although strong and weak islands are not usually directly compared in acceptability judgment experiments, violations of strong islands tend to receive lower mean acceptability ratings than violations of weak islands [3,4]. Another way in which strong and weak islands are claimed to differ is that the intuitive acceptability of weak islands depends on the extracted element.…”