The real-time status of strong and weak islands.

Derya Cokal,Patrick Sturt

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0263879

Abstract

In two eye-tracking reading experiments, we used a variant of the filled gap technique to investigate how strong and weak islands are processed on a moment-to-moment basis during comprehension. Experiment 1 provided a conceptual replication of previous studies showing that real time processing is sensitive to strong islands. In the absence of an island, readers experienced processing difficulty when a pronoun appeared in a position of a predicted gap, but this difficulty was absent when the pronoun appeared inside a strong island. Experiment 2 showed an analogous effect for weak islands: a processing cost was seen for a pronoun in the position of a predicted gap in a that-complement clause, but this cost was absent in a matched whether clause, which constitutes a weak island configuration. Overall, our results are compatible with the claim that active dependency formation is suspended, or reduced, in both weak and strong island structures.

Highlights

Sentences may include dependencies between non-adjacent words or phrases
The purpose of the present paper is to examine how strong and weak islands are processed in real time, and we will return to discuss how this might be impacted by the differences between the two types of islands in the discussion below
In addition to the question of whether real-time unbounded dependency formation is modulated by both strong and weak islands, the studies that we report below consider the potential role of resumptive pronouns in the processing of long-distance dependencies

Summary

Introduction

In a sentence (A.a) below, the magazine is not adjacent to the preposition about, but instead there is a gap (marked “___”) where the magazine would normally appear in a canonical sentence like The hairdresser talked about the magazine. This is the magazine that Jane said [that the hairdresser had talked about __]. Such unbounded dependencies are subject to island constraints [1], which prohibit—or limit the acceptability of—dependency links across certain types of domain boundaries. This is the magazine that Jane wondered [whether the hairdresser had talked about __]

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Discussion

Conclusion