한국언어과학회

A parasitic gap, an illicit gap, is acceptable when it is dependent on a real gap and the parasitic gap construction containing two gaps is difficult to understand due to the structural complexity. Moreover, these constructions are very rare in Korean learners' input because they are not learned in L2 classes. This study aims to investigate Korean learners' syntactic knowledge and processing of parasitic gaps inside subject islands using an offline scalar judgement task and an online self-paced reading task. The offline task showed the sensitivity of the licensing constraint. The online task indicated that Korean learners computed the internal representation of the parasitic gap by applying the parsing principle and the strategy during reading the sentence, which was similar to native speakers' processing. Therefore, these results suggest that there exists the logical problem in the acquisition of parasitic gap constructions despite the poverty of the stimulus.