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.

You have used IPA to document your language’s words and their features, but this chapter introduces other options for writing your conlang, beginning with a brief overview of different types of writing systems. The second section introduces romanization strategies, which utilize standard keyboard characters to represent sounds in a language. The third section discusses how you can adapt an existing orthography to your conlang, provided it makes sense for your speakers to have access to that existing orthography. Finally, the fourth section discusses the process of creating a unique orthography if that is the direction you want to take for your language. By the end of this chapter, you will decide how you might romanize your language and whether you will use an orthography to represent the written form of your language.

The focus of this chapter is on sounds. The chapter begins with an introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet to show how you can represent sounds with written symbols. The discussion turns to phonetic features of sounds and how they are connected to physical features of human anatomy. The second section focuses on the production and features of consonant sounds while the third section explores vowels and their features. The final section discusses how to create a balanced sound inventory when selecting sounds for your language. By the end of this chapter, you will select the consonant and vowel sounds you want to incorporate in your conlang.

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.

This chapter introduces constructed languages (conlangs) by first differentiating them from natlangs and then debunking common misconceptions about them. Along with defining major types of conlangs, one of the goals of this chapter is to identify the linguistic features that make conlangs languages. By the end of this chapter, you will make some important initial decisions about your conlang and conlanging goals.

This chapter builds on the grammatical foundation provided in Chapters 7 and 8, specifically diving into grammatical features of nouns. In this chapter, you will be introduced to three major ways nouns can inflect in languages: number, noun class, and case. The examples provided throughout each section focus on the most common types of inflections found in languages to help inspire you as you make noun-marking decisions for your conlang. The final section explores connections between adpositions and case. The exercises at the end of this chapter ask you to decide whether you will mark nouns for number, noun class, and/or case and, if so, how.

This chapter defines the term “natural language” (natlang) and introduces the field of linguistics. A major theme of the chapter is that languages change over time. The chapter demonstrates how you can systematically study those changes to understand how and why the language shifts typically occur. Language change is further connected to the development of language families and the importance of contact among speakers of different languages. At the end of the chapter, you will be asked to apply these concepts to a brief study of natural languages.

This chapter focuses on how sounds can shift when they occur in particular environments. It introduces key concepts from the field of phonology, such as phonemes and allophones, and demonstrates how sounds commonly change during speech production. The major types of sound shifts discussed in this chapter include assimilation, deletion, insertion, and dissimilation. By the end of the chapter, you will be asked to apply phonological rules to a small data set and create a set of potential phonological shifts you can incorporate into your language.

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.