TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pañeda, Claudia
A1  - Lago, Sol
A1  - Vares, Elena
A1  - Veríssimo, João Marques
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Island effects in Spanish comprehension
JF  - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics
N2  - A growing body of experimental syntactic research has revealed substantial variation in the magnitude of island effects, not only across languages but also across different grammatical constructions. Adopting a well-established experimental design, the present study examines island effects in Spanish using a speeded acceptability judgment task. To quantify variation across grammatical constructions, we tested extraction from four different types of structure (subjects, complex noun phrases, adjuncts and interrogative clauses). The results of Bayesian mixed effects modelling showed that the size of island effects varied between constructions, such that there was clear evidence of subject, adjunct and interrogative island effects, but not of complex noun phrase island effects. We also failed to find evidence that island effects were modulated by participants' working memory capacity as measured by an operation span task. To account for our results, we suggest that variability in island effects across constructions may be due to the interaction of syntactic, semantic-pragmatic and processing factors, which may affect island types differentially due to their idiosyncratic properties.
KW  - extraction islands
KW  - Spanish
KW  - reading comprehension
KW  - working memory
KW  - sentence processing
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1058
SN  - 2397-1835
VL  - 5
IS  - 1
PB  - Open Library of Humanities
CY  - London
ER  -