Agreement attraction has been extensively studied in many languages and 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 grammatical due to the presence of the attractor word cabinets that matches the verbal auxiliary in number. This is not the case when the attractor word is not plural, but singular (cabinet). This illusion of grammaticality has been documented in many of the world’s languages. Here, we report an untimed acceptability judgement experiment that tested the presence of this illusion with native speakers of Czech. We find evidence that Czech comprehenders notice the ungrammatical agreement pattern and judge these sentences as less acceptable, but that they are not affected by the the number-match of the attractor in any way.

Comprehenders have been found to activate, select, and represent plausible alternatives to focused elements when processing incoming sentences (see Gotzner & Spalek, 2019 for an overview). This is consistent with Rooth’s (1992) theory of focus interpretation, which claims that the function of focus is to create an additional level of meaning consisting of a set of propositions derived by replacing the focused element with its contextually appropriate alternatives of the same semantic type. However, the psycholinguistic research on the processing of focus has mostly been done on a small sample of Germanic languages which mostly use prosody to mark focus. We tested whether the current results generalise to Czech, which can use word order to mark narrow focus. We report on a probe recognition study aiming to test whether Czech comprehenders represent alternatives to focused subjects. The results provide preliminary evidence in favour of this claim.