A Meta-analysis of Syntactic Satiation in Extraction from Islands

Abstract

Sentence acceptability judgments are often affected by a pervasive phenomenon called satiation: native speakers give increasingly higher ratings to initially degraded sentences after repeated exposure. Various studies have investigated the satiation effect experimentally, the vast majority of which focused on different types of island-violating sentences in English (sentences with illicit long-distance syntactic movements). However, mixed findings are reported regarding which types of island violations are affected by satiation and which ones are not. This article presents a meta-analysis of past experimental studies on the satiation of island effects in English, with the aim of providing accurate estimates of the rate of satiation for each type of island, testing whether different island effects show different rates of satiation, exploring potential factors that contributed to the heterogeneity in past results, and spotting possible publication bias. The meta-analysis shows that adjunct islands, the Complex NP Constraint (CNPC), subject islands, the that-trace effect, the want-for construction, and whether-islands reliably exhibit satiation, albeit at different rates. No evidence for satiation is found for the Left Branch Condition (LBC). Whether context sentences were presented in the original acceptability judgment experiments predicts the differences in the rates of satiation reported across studies. Potential publication bias is found among studies testing the CNPC and whether-islands. These meta-analytic results can be used to inform debates regarding the nature of island effects and serve as a proof of concept that meta-analysis can be a valuable tool for linguistic research.