An Experimental Study on Scrambling out of Islands: To the Left and to the Right

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study to examine whether scrambling out of an island is (im-)possible in Korean. It is shown that scrambling out of an island may trigger occasional additive degradation in acceptability, but no super-additive degradation is obtained in leftward or rightward scrambling (or right-dislocation), contrary to wh-movement in English. Our results also show that strong islands may cause additive degradation whereas weak islands do not. The current study poses a new challenge to a processing approach to islands which solely relies on linear dependencies, and demonstrates that the role and type of island structures must be considered. Our research also suggests that a factorial-design experiment needs to be employed to examine potential interactions among scrambling, the direction of movement, and island effects in language.