Learning Island-insensitivity from the input: A corpus analysis of child- and youth-directed text in Norwegian

Norwegian allows filler-gap dependencies into relative clauses (RCs) and embedded questions (EQs) – domains that are usually considered islands in other languages. We conducted a corpus study on youth-directed reading material to assess what direct evidence children receive for islands. Results suggest the input contains examples of both RCs EQs, but significantly less frequent than long-distance non-island clauses. Moreover, island violations is characterized by absence forms are, principle, acceptable target grammar. Thus, although they encounter islands, must generalize beyond fine-grained distributional characteristics acquire full pattern island-insensitivity their language. consider how different learning models would fare acquiring generalizations speculate observed distribution reflects interaction syntactic, semantic, pragmatic conditions.