TY  - JOUR
A1  - Laurinavichyute, Anna
A1  - von der Malsburg, Titus
T1  - Semantic attraction in sentence comprehension
JF  - Cognitive science
N2  - 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 horizontal ellipsis ").
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, 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 provided initial evidence that this may be the case. Here, we report three single-trial experiments in English 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 which confirmed 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 general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model.
KW  - agreement attraction
KW  - computational modeling
KW  - sentence processing;
KW  - similarity-based interference
KW  - semantic attraction
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13086
SN  - 0364-0213
SN  - 1551-6709
VL  - 46
IS  - 2
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -