Do 4-year-olds employ island constraints during sentence processing?

Abstract

Previous research has proven that adults and children interpret and process filler-gap dependencies actively. However, in environments where a filler-gap dependency is impossible (like islands), adults no longer actively resolve filler-gap dependencies. By age 4, children have knowledge of relative clause island constraints. Does children's processing of wh-questions show knowledge of grammatical constraints? Do children use knowledge of islands to process sentences in real time? The goal of this poster is to design an experiment to test these questions.