This book contains articles on the theory, acquisition and processing of island constraints. The book is unique in taking an interdisciplinary approach to a syntactic phenomenon that has been at the center of linguistic debates since the 1960s. Both transformational and non-transformational approaches to island constraints are represented. The papers in the volume show how data from empirical studies of the role of island constraints in processing and acquisition by normals and by special populations can contribute to our understanding of broad issues concerning the representation of linguistic structures in the mind, including the interplay between lexical, pragmatic and syntactic knowledge. In addition, they contribute vital data to specific on-going debates in processing and development, such as the emergence of movement rules in children's grammars and the temporal ordering of events in the analysis of discontinuous dependencies by the language processor. The papers in the volume exploit examples from a variety of languages and use a variety of experimental techniques to marshal arguments for specific models of the theory of island constraints and their deployment in real-time language acquisition and language processing.

constraints', which serve to block the association of antecedent to gap under specific syntactic conditions. Of the restrictions identified by Ross and others, the ones we will discuss here are the Complex NP Constraint, exemplified with a relative clause in (3b) and with a nominal complement in (4a), the Subject and wh Island Conditions (Chomsky, 1973) in (4b, c) respectively, and the Adjunct Island Condi tion (see Huang, 1982's Condition on Extraction Domain), illustrated in (4d, e). (4) (a) *John, Mary made the claim that Sally plans to recommend_ for ajob. John, Mary claimed that Sally plans to recommend _ for a job. As for John, Mary heard the rumor that Sally intends to marry him. (b) *John, an article about _just appeared in the newspaper. As for John, an article about him just appeared in the news paper. (c) *Bill, I wonder who likes_. As for Bill, I wonder who likes him. (d) *The heat, we left early because of _. As for the heat, we left early because of it. (e) *The money, I lied so that I could keep_. As for the money, I lied so that I could keep it."