AUTHOR=Atkinson Emily , Apple Aaron , Rawlins Kyle , Omaki Akira 

TITLE=Similarity of wh-Phrases and Acceptability Variation in wh-Islands

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=6

YEAR=2016

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.02048

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2015.02048

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>In <italic>wh</italic>-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted <italic>wh</italic>-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another <italic>wh</italic>-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in <italic>wh</italic>-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential theory – Featural Relativized Minimality – has argued that the <italic>wh</italic>-island effect is modulated exclusively by the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features in the two <italic>wh</italic>-phrases, but psycholinguistic theories of memory encoding and retrieval mechanisms predict that semantic properties of <italic>wh</italic>-phrases should also contribute to <italic>wh</italic>-island amelioration. We report four acceptability judgment experiments that systematically investigate the role of morpho-syntactic and semantic features in <italic>wh</italic>-island violations. The results indicate that the distribution of <italic>wh</italic>-island amelioration is best explained by an account that incorporates the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features as well as the semantic denotation of the <italic>wh</italic>-phrases. We argue that an integration of syntactic theories and perspectives from psycholinguistics can enrich our understanding of acceptability variation in <italic>wh</italic>-dependencies.</p>