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 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.