The Relation between Working‑Memory Capacity and Island Effects: A Statistical Modeling Approach

Abstract

In this paper we report three experiments designed to test one of the premises of the WM-based processing analysis: that the strength of island effects should vary as a function of individual differences in WM capacity. Adopting the methodology that Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips (2012a) use for L1 speakers, we tested forty Korean learners of English on four different island-effect types by employing the acceptability rating task and two different measures of WM capacity involving reading span and n- back. Applying several statistical analysis techniques we find no evidence of a statistically significant relation between WM capacity and island effects. These results indicate that island effects evident even for L2 learners are more likely to be attributed to grammatical constraints than to limited processing resources.