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 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 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.