Illusions of Plausibility: The Case of Semantic Attraction

Semantic attraction is an illusion of plausibility that occurs when a noun with verb-matching semantic cues intervenes in the subject-verb agreement relation. Thus, a sentence like “The drawer with the knife cuts” tends to be perceived as more acceptable than “The drawer with the handle cuts” because cut and knife (the attractor) often co-occur. We report results from a self-paced reading experiment followed by two offline tasks (acceptability judgments and comprehension questions) that sought to examine the underlying factors in stronger or weaker semantic attraction effects. That was done by manipulating the frequency with which nouns co-occur with the verb and the cognitive load on working memory. The converging evidence reveals that online processing is rarely disturbed by implausible sentences, but their interpretation is directly linked to lexical co-occurrence and general contextual plausibility. Therefore, not only does acceptability in implausible sentences increase with the presence of an attractor but the degree to which the attractor shares features with the local noun can be a predictor of the likelihood of attraction, show-ing speakers’ sensitivity to plausible reading. That, in turn, suggests that in addition to a cue-based parsing mechanism, speakers' expectations, based on their world knowledge, seem to contribute to sentence interpretation.