A Meta-Analysis of Processing Factors in Wh-Island Acceptability

This study investigates how processing factors contribute to cross-linguistic variation in wh-island acceptability. A Bayesian meta-analysis evaluates the contribution of dependency locality, filler accessibility, intervener properties, and clause boundary type to super-additive island effects. Results show that while clause boundaries and filler accessibility consistently influence acceptability, other factors show weak or inconsistent effects. The absence of interaction effects further suggests that these processing costs combine additively rather than through categorical thresholds. Cross-linguistic variation also emerges: Italian and Hebrew show residual island effects, whereas Norwegian and Slovenian do not. These findings support a hybrid account where general processing constraints interact with language-specific grammatical and parsing properties.