Some researchers have argued that the unacceptability of sentences involving island violations is rooted in processing limitations rather than constraints on grammar. Consistent with this view, previous self-paced reading studies have suggested that when a discourse-linked (D-linked) wh-phrase is extracted from an island, there is no island effect. The present study uses eye tracking to examine the effect of D-linking on sentences containing an island violation. Our results indicate that island violations lead to increased processing difficulty regardless of whether the extracted wh-phrase is D-linked. These findings present a challenge to processing-based accounts of island effects and support constraint-based approaches.