This paper presents the results of an acceptability judgment experiment with 285 Korean native speakers designed to investigate factors affecting processing of Korean CNPC island effects employing wh-in-situ question constructions. Unlike a traditionally accepted proposal, namely that island effects are nullified in in-situ questions, the results of the current experiment do show that there is an island effect in Korean wh-in-situ constructions and that increasing the specificity of the head noun aggravates acceptability of the wh-in-situ questions as their English counterparts do. Unpredicted patterns of acceptability with respect to D-linking are also reported in the current experiment results: When the given wh-in-situ phrase is D-linked, it degrades the acceptability status of the sentence compared to its bare wh-phrase counterpart. If a D-linked wh-phrase is scrambled however, it does improve the acceptability status of a given construction. We argue that these results can best be analyzed by postulating a parsing process of wh-in-situ phrases called Q-particle licensor searching to identify the scope of in-situ wh-phrases.