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This paper addresses a question arising from the unexpected results of a judgment study of wh-island effects of wh-in-situ questions in Korean reported in Yoon (2010). In the study, two groups of speakers were found: the speakers who mistakenly interpreted wh-in-situ questions with a non-local wh-Q association as Y/N-questions and judged them to be acceptable and those who judged them to be acceptable under the correct wh-question interpretation. A natural question arising from such a result is why neither judgments are identical to the standard wh-island effect judgment in the syntactic literature. As an explanation, I hypothesize that the standard wh-island effect judgment corresponds to the misinterpretation judgment and argue for it by showing that there is a strong correlation between the wh-island effects reported in the syntactic literature and the possibility that wh-in-situ questions with a non-local wh-Q association will be misinterpreted as Y/N-questions but (ii) that no correlation is observed between the wh-island effects and the acceptability scores obtained from the study of average native speakers. Ultimately, the validity of this hypothesis suggests that the genuine nature of wh-island effects of wh-in-situ questions is misinterpretation, not degradedness.
