Under no illusion: An acceptability study on Czech agreement attraction

The phenomenon of agreement attraction has garnered considerable attention in the psycholinguistic literature on both production and comprehension. While in production, it has been found that in English sentences such as '*The key to the cabinets were rusty' are produced as speech errors by native speakers. In comprehension, researchers have long found evidence of people mistakenly considering these sentences to be grammatical. This illusion of grammaticality is said to be caused by the presence of the plural-matching attractor noun 'cabinets'. The effect has been observed in many languages. In the current study, we attempted to replicate it in Czech. We ran an untimed acceptability judgement study to do this. While Czech speakers consistently noticed the ungrammaticality of these sentences, they came under no illusion and the number of the attractor noun was found to have no effect. This raises questions about the universality of this phenomenon.