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A processing-based account of subliminal wh-island effects

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Abstract

Wh-island effects are notorious for their cross-linguistic variation. However, experimental syntax studies observed super-additive wh-island effects in some languages which were previously argued to be immune to them. In four acceptability judgment experiments, we investigate the origin of super-additivity in acceptable wh-islands, so-called “subliminal island effects,” focusing on Hebrew. Our first experiment reveals a super-additive wh-island effect in Hebrew. However, we suggest that the super-additivity measure for wh-islands is contaminated by processing factors. Specifically, we propose that in this case, the decrease in acceptability reflects interference caused by the simultaneous maintenance of two dependencies, rather than grammatical islandhood. The following experiments demonstrate that super-additivity can be observed in binding structures, where it cannot be attributed to a violation of a grammatical constraint, but rather to processing costs related to interference for maintenance processes. We also show that when minimizing these costs, super-additivity does not emerge in Hebrew wh-islands. We conclude that processing costs underlie the apparent wh-island effect in Hebrew, and perhaps in additional languages, and that the super-additivity paradigm should be fine-tuned in order to avoid these confounds.

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Notes

  1. However, others have suggested that these observations and analyses do not grasp the full complexity of the data, claiming for example that variations in acceptability are apparent also within languages (Grimshaw 1986).

  2. The full materials for all the experiments reported in this paper are available upon request from the corresponding author.

  3. Hebrew does not manifest a that-trace effect, and thus licenses the structures in (7a) and (7c).

  4. For example:

    1. (i)
      figure d
    1. (ii)
      figure e

  5. Hebrew does not license resumption in wh-dependencies (Sells 1984). However, prepositional RPs colloquially appear (possibly as intrusions or late corrections) in d-linked questions (Sharvit 1999) as in (i), an example of an intermediate grammaticality filler sentence from our experiments.

    1. (i)
      figure f

    RPs in Hebrew RCs are formally obligatory in indirect object position (Sells 1984). However, these RP-containing PPs are often omitted in colloquial Hebrew, as in (ii) from our fillers, and in (iii), a transcription of a real life example.

    1. (ii)
      figure g
    1. (iii)
      figure h

  6. Z-transformed ratings, representing the number of standard deviations between the raw rating and the participant’s mean, are argued to eliminate some scale biases between participants (Schütze and Sprouse 2014).

  7. Comparisons related to the matrix resolution positions were also non-significant, and are less relevant as these positions had gaps in both experiments.

  8. Although these reflect comparisons between experiments, we believe that this pattern is reliable since both experiments were run in parallel on the same population (with random assignment of participants to experiments). In addition, experimental materials were almost indistinguishable and filler items were completely identical.

  9. To keep the experiments as closely matched as possible we refrained from alterations not required for the design of the experiment. This might have rendered the materials of Experiments 4–5 less plausible than the ones used in Experiments 1–2.

  10. Hebrew has grammatical agreement and thus makes it possible to specify the gender of each referent through its morphological form. We did not mark agreement on all NPs for readability, but the reader should bear in mind that NPs are not necessarily assigned their stereotypical gender.

  11. As suggested by an NLLT reviewer, it could have been the case that a subject resolution, which involves resolving a dependency when another dependency has just been coded, would burden the parser even though maintenance costs are mitigated. However, our results show no sign of such processing difficulty.

  12. In this context, it might be interesting to consider the results of Experiment 3. Cataphora dependencies in that experiment encompass maintenance costs, but the antecedents in these dependencies do not exhibit a preference to discourse-prominent positions as in extraction dependencies. Therefore, an analysis of the length effect in Experiment 3 might contribute to this discussion. We conducted two pairwise comparisons between the matrix and embedded resolution conditions, one for embedded that-clause structures and one for embedded wh-questions. This analysis revealed a significant difference only for the wh-question conditions (Estimate = 0.34, SE = 0.1, t = 3.5, p = .002), with no effect in that-clause sentences (Estimate = 0.08, SE = 0.09, t = 0.87, p = .4). Namely, the main effect of length detected in Experiment 3 was driven by the decreased ratings of the Embedded resolution | Wh-question condition, and was an indirect result of the observed interaction. This might provide some support for the information-structure based account.

  13. In future research, it might be also interesting to compare cases within Hebrew which were argued to exhibit weaker (i) and stronger (ii) wh-island effects (Preminger 2010).

    1. (i)
      figure l
    1. (ii)
      figure m

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dave Kush and three anonymous NLLT reviewers for extremely valuable comments and suggestions. This research was supported by the EU Marie Curie Career Integration Grant No. 631512 (P.I. Aya Meltzer-Asscher).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linguistics Department, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Maayan Keshev & Aya Meltzer-Asscher

  2. Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Aya Meltzer-Asscher

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  1. Maayan Keshev
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Correspondence to Maayan Keshev.

Appendix: Tables 8, 9 and 10

Appendix: Tables 8, 9 and 10

Table 8 Mean (SD) ratings (on a scale of 1 to 7) in Experiments 1 and 2
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Table 9 Mean (SD) ratings (on a scale of 1 to 7) in Experiment 3
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Table 10 Mean (SD) ratings (on a scale of 1 to 7) in Experiment 4
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Keshev, M., Meltzer-Asscher, A. A processing-based account of subliminal wh-island effects. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 37, 621–657 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-018-9416-1

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