Only case-syncretic nouns attract: Czech and Slovak gender agreement

Abstract

Attraction effects in the comprehension of ungrammatical sentences have long been observed for number and gender agreement across many languages. These prolific findings have led researchers to claim that attraction effects are universal. However, recent evidence from Czech has shown that number agreement attraction is either non-existent in the language or negligible in size. We aimed to test whether this is also the case for gender agreement and to explore the role of case syncretism in the emergence of attraction effects. Crucially, we evaluated the predictions of the cue-based retrieval model in light of the resulting estimates. Across three self-paced reading experiments, two on Czech ($N_1$ = 172, $N_3$ = 255) and the other on the closely related Slovak ($N_2$ = 119), gender attraction in ungrammatical sentences was attested only with case-syncretic attractors. No differences between grammatical conditions were found. Based on computational modelling estimates, we argue that these empirical results contradict the predictions of the classic cue-based retrieval model but are compatible with the repair-by-retrieval account.