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Introduction
The purpose of the present article is to focus on psycholinguistic work on attraction, understood as the aberrant outcome of an agreement process (Bock et al. 2001: 85-86). Attraction occurs when competition between two or more NPs inside a larger complex NP (i.e. an NP which consists of two or more constituent NPs) causes agreement mistakes of the kind *the key to the cabinets are in the kitchen. The structure of this paper is as follows. First, in this introduction, I present basic facts of the grammar and the processing of agreement with a view to arguing that psycholinguistic research on this topic is changing the way we approach it and enriching our knowledge of it. Section 2 reviews the most relevant findings in the psycholinguistic literature on attraction. This implies coming to terms with two basic families of rival models: the formal and the notional. In Section 3 I focus on the two most recent instantiations of these models, Marking and Morphing (Bock et al. 2001; Eberhard, Cooper Cutting & Bock 2005) and Maximal Input (Vigliocco, Butterworth & Semenza 1995; Vigliocco, Butterworth & Garret 1996a; Vigliocco & Franck 2001; Vigliocco & Hartsuiker 2002). Finally, in Section 4, entitled 'Morphology and architectural opportunism in attraction', I try to show that no existing model of attraction can account either for the latest findings in the psycholinguistic literature or for the classic mixture of formal encapsulation and semantic interference that characterises the grammar and the processing of agreement. In essence, it will be argued that agreement cannot be properly understood unless models incorporate an adequate measurement of the role and size of the morphological component of every language studied, as agreement operations are continuously sensitive to this. The general idea, which I extend from Berg (1998), Lorimor et al. (2008), Acuña-Fariña (2009), and Foote & Bock (in press), is that a strong morphosyntactic component blocks (rather than facilitates) semantic interference in agreement operations, and that languages opportunistically use semantics in establishing agreement ties depending not only on morphological richness but also on the direction of encoding (production vs. comprehension).
Agreement has become a major challenge for both linguistic theory and psycholinguistics. As Corbett (2006: 116) has noted,...