Grammaticality illusions in Czech: A speeded acceptability study of agreement attraction

Abstract

Agreement attraction has been extensively studied in both the production and comprehension of language. In comprehension, it has been found that ungrammatical sentences such as '*The key to the cabinets were rusty' are often judged as acceptable due to the word 'cabinets' that matches the verb in number, but not when the attractor is singular ('cabinet'). This illusion of grammaticality has been documented in many of the world's languages. We report a speeded acceptability judgement experiment that tested the presence of this illusion in Czech. We find that Czech comprehenders notice the ungrammatical agreement pattern reliably, and that their acceptability judgements are affected by the number-match of the attractor. This number agreement attraction effect is however minuscule when compared to what has been reported in the literature on English. We show this in a comparative analysis of our data with those from Wagers et al. (2009).