Semantic Attraction in Sentence Comprehension

Agreement attraction is a cross-linguistic phenomenon where a verb occasionally agrees not with its subject, as required by grammar, but instead with an unrelated noun (‘The key to the cabinets were . . . ’). Despite the clear violation of grammatical rules, comprehenders often rate these sentences as acceptable. Contenders for explaining agreement attraction fall into two broad classes: Morphosyntactic accounts specifically designed to explain agreement attraction, and more general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model (2005), which explain attraction as a consequence of how linguistic structure is stored and accessed in content-addressable memory. In the present research, we disambiguate between these two classes by testing a surprising prediction made by the Lewis and Vasishth model but not by the morphosyntactic accounts, namely that attraction should not be limited to morphosyntax, but that semantic features of unrelated nouns equally induce attraction. A recent study by Cunnings and Sturt (2018) provided initial evidence that this may be the case. Here, we report three single-trial experiments in English (N1 = 1, 072, N2 = 1, 426, and N3 = 2, 454) that compared semantic and agreement attraction and tested whether and how the two interact. All three experiments showed strong semantically induced attraction effects closely mirroring agreement attraction effects. We complement these results with computational simulations confirming that the Lewis and Vasishth model can faithfully reproduce the observed results. In sum, our findings suggest that attraction is a more general phenomenon than is commonly believed, and therefore favor more generalsentence processing models such as the Lewis and Vasishth model.