ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the techniques of experimental syntax to examine island constraints and the that-trace effect in native and L2 English with the goal of better understanding the relation between the learner’s age of arrival (AoA) in the new language environment and their ultimate attainment in the language. Experiment 1 shows that the island effects examined are essentially uniform across native, early AoA, and late AoA groups. Experiment 2 shows that for that-trace only the native group shows the classic effect. This difference between island constraints and the that-trace effect is consistent with the view that island effects result from exceeding speakers’ capacity to process filler-gap dependencies, thus affecting all groups uniformly, whereas the that-trace effect results from a language-specific truncation process in the syntax. Because the evidence in the input for this latter process is sparse, we expect acquisition of it to be slow, so the fact that we find AoA effects in this case is not surprising.
