Experience-based effects

This chapter presents experimental evidence suggesting that the acceptability of certain island violations is contingent on the prior experience that speakers have with both main situation type described by the proposition itself, and the particular syntactic construction in which it is conveyed. Highly coherent and prototypical complex structures more easily lend themselves to licensing extraction from otherwise deeply embedded positions, and comprehenders can adapt to the frequency of the input in order to overcome the processing difficulty caused when the input is unusual and inconsistent with their prior experience. Acceptability ratings thus range from highly acceptable to unacceptable, suggesting that the plausibility of the proposition itself, the degree to which the extracted phrase plays a role in the main action, and the frequency of such dependencies create a malleable acceptability cline. Acceptability differences likely stem from the proposition itself, the world knowledge it evokes, and the degree to which the extracted relevant matters for the main state-of-affairs that the utterance conveys.