Scrambling and island constraints in Korean

There have been several controversies on the existence of island constraints in Korean. This paper takes an experimental approach to island constraints in Korean and examines the properties of islandhood in Korean. This paper basically adopts the experimental designs in Sprouse et al. (2012, 2014), but one more factor Scramble is also considered in the experiments as in Kim and Goodall (2014). Although the latter study includes only two island constraints (whether island and adjunct island), this paper contains all of four island constraints in the former studies. The experiments are conducted with the magnitude estimation (ME) method, and the acceptability scores are measured with line drawings for one hundred students. After the experiment, the collected data are analyzed with three types of analyses: generalized linear model (GLM), DD scores, and random forests. Through the analysis, the followings are observed: (i) Korean also has island phenomena, (ii) scrambling increases the DD scores in all of four types of island constraints, and (iii) the increases of the DD scores are not due to the violation of island constraints but can be explained by a processing-based account.