Chapter 7 explores an empirical challenge for both representational- and retrieval-based accounts of attraction, focusing on object pronouns and their resistance to attraction effects. While attraction has been observed across various linguistic dependencies, such as subject–verb agreement and reflexives, attempts to induce attraction with object pronouns have consistently failed. This chapter reviews past studies and introduces new high-powered self-paced reading experiments designed to test attraction for object pronouns. The findings show, for the first time, that object pronouns are indeed susceptible to attraction effects, specifically when attractor nouns match the pronoun in gender. The experiments also reveal a grammatical asymmetry, where attraction occurs only in ungrammatical sentences, aligning with the predictions of retrieval-based accounts. These results challenge representational accounts, which predict attraction in both grammatical and ungrammatical configurations. This chapter provides new insights into how gender cues are processed during pronoun resolution and offers crucial evidence favoring the retrieval-based account of attraction.

Chapter 3 focuses on agreement attraction, one of the most well-studied phenomena in psycholinguistics. Linguistic dependencies, particularly subject–verb number agreement, are disrupted by attractors – intervening elements that have the correct information in the wrong position. Attractors lead to the formation of illicit grammatical dependencies, creating the illusion that ungrammatical sentences are acceptable or that well-formed sentences are not. Focusing primarily on subject–verb number agreement, the chapter introduces readers to experimental paradigms used to study attraction effects in sentence production and comprehension. It discusses key factors that modulate attraction, including number morphology, sentence complexity, and the syntactic properties of attractors. A major theme is how attraction-based interference reveals underlying principles of memory encoding and retrieval and real-time language processing. The chapter also introduces methodological tools, such as factorial designs, and experimental techniques like self-paced reading and eye-tracking, which have been critical in uncovering how agreement attraction operates in moment-to-moment language comprehension.

Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive survey of various linguistic illusions, showing how errors in language processing arise. It begins with auditory illusions, such as the Yanny/Laurel effect and McGurk effect, highlighting how multisensory inputs influence speech perception. It covers sentence processing illusions, including lingering misinterpretations, role reversals, and local coherence effects, which reveal systematic misinterpretations of syntactically complex or semantically ambiguous sentences. The comparative illusion, missing VP effect, and illusory NPI licensing are explored, demonstrating how these errors reveal the workings of the fundamental cognitive mechanisms that support language processing, such as memory retrieval and the interaction between domain-specific and domain-general processes. A central theme is the interaction between shallow processing strategies and deeper cognitive mechanisms, which sometimes lead to illusory interpretations. This exploration of linguistic illusions underscores their value as tools for uncovering how the mind processes language in real time, contributing to broader theories about sentence comprehension and cognitive architecture.

Chapter 8 provides a summary of the book’s key findings, emphasizing how the retrieval-based account provides better empirical coverage over the representational-based accounts. This chapter then explores key outstanding questions in the study of linguistic illusions, including the interaction between encoding and retrieval processes, individual differences, the effects of good-enough processing, and the role of different linguistic features across languages. The chapter concludes by outlining future directions for research, suggesting potential interventions to reduce attraction errors through memory training and timing manipulations. As the final chapter, it reflects on how scientific inquiry continues to evolve, encouraging further investigation into the cognitive mechanisms behind real-time language processing.

Chapter 6 revisits the grammatical asymmetry, a key effect in agreement attraction research. The grammatical asymmetry refers to the phenomenon where attraction effects occur in ungrammatical sentences but not in grammatical ones. This chapter evaluates existing evidence, particularly in response to challenges raised by Hammerly et al. (2019), who claimed that the empirical evidence for the asymmetry is not particularly strong and that the effect could be a product of response bias rather than an inherent property of agreement attraction. Through a detailed review of over ninety experiments, the chapter finds strong support for a grammatical asymmetry, as predicted by the retrieval-based account. Additionally, it explores how altering the ratio of ungrammatical to grammatical fillers in experiments can influence retrieval mechanisms and artificially produce a symmetrical attraction profile, yielding the response bias effect observed by Hammerly et al. These findings suggest that a symmetrical profile could emerge from increased uncertainty in memory retrieval rather than faulty linguistic representations, offering a nuanced interpretation of existing behavioral findings.

Chapter 4 introduces the leading accounts of attraction. Representational-based accounts claim that attraction arises from errors in the encoding of linguistic structures in working memory, where misrepresented features like plural number are mistakenly bound to the wrong item in memory. Feature percolation and spreading activation drive feature misrepresentation, both contributing to attraction effects. In contrast, retrieval-based accounts claim that while the sentence’s structure is faithfully encoded, attraction occurs during memory retrieval, where nontarget items that partially match retrieval cues (such as plural number) are erroneously selected for dependency formation. The chapter addresses the strengths and limitations of each approach, discussing the model predictions and the empirical evidence used to arbitrate between the accounts. Finally, it suggests that representational and retrieval-based accounts are not mutually exclusive; a comprehensive understanding of sentence processing must consider the interactions between encoding and retrieval mechanisms. This theoretical review sets the stage for evaluating empirical findings discussed in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 1 introduces linguistic illusions, focusing on how the mind processes language in real time and how systematic errors, such as agreement attraction, occur. The chapter first explains how linguistic illusions are cases where listeners or readers misunderstand or fail to notice anomalies in language. Agreement attraction, a phenomenon where mismatched subject–verb agreement is overlooked due to interference from nearby elements, serves as the primary case study. The chapter draws parallels between linguistic illusions and optical illusions, emphasizing that while both reveal discrepancies between perception and reality, linguistic illusions are more probabilistic and context dependent. This chapter also sets up the importance of studying these illusions to uncover fundamental cognitive mechanisms and processes underlying language comprehension. By systematically analyzing linguistic illusions, researchers can gain deeper insights into the cognitive architecture of language and the role of memory encoding and retrieval in language processing. The chapter concludes by outlining the book’s structure and key questions that the study of linguistic illusions aims to answer.

Chapter 5 evaluates the leading theories of agreement attraction by comparing their ability to explain key empirical findings. The chapter examines four major effects: the markedness asymmetry, grammatical asymmetry, timing asymmetry, and attraction beyond number agreement dependencies. Through detailed comparisons, the chapter highlights how retrieval-based accounts provide the broadest empirical coverage, successfully explaining each effect, while representational-based accounts mainly capture the markedness asymmetry. The chapter also introduces evidence from studies on semantic and morphosyntactic attraction, showing that retrieval-based models offer a more unified explanation of these effects across linguistic domains. Additionally, the chapter discusses evidence of number misinterpretation, which is uniquely predicted by representational accounts, but suggests that these effects may be task-specific artifacts of metalinguistic processes. This theoretical arbitration provides a comprehensive overview of the strengths and limitations of both accounts and emphasizes the need for further research to fully understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying attraction phenomena.

In this chapter I present the main elements of the theory of bare phrase structure: principally the basic operation Merge. This operation replaces phrase-structure rules of all kinds, including the X′-theoretic ones, as the generative component of the theory. We will see that c-command can be directly derived from the effects of Merge. We will also see that Merge can give us a notion of projection. We look at the relation between Merge and LCA, and also introduce the Labelling Algorithm.