Errors in subject-verb agreement are often misperceived: erroneous utterances like ‘’The key to the cabinets *were’’ elicit the illusory acceptability of ungrammatical verbs (‘attraction’; e.g. Wagers et al, 2009) and an increase in non-literal responses to comprehension questions asking about the number of the head (accepting ‘’keys’’ as the head; Patson & Husband, 2016). In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, we demonstrated that both phenomena have the same source: individuals fixate a plural version of the head noun in response to hearing plural cues from other nouns in the sentence as well as in response to an ungrammatical plural verb.