Dynamical models of sentence processing

We suggest that the theory of dynamical systems provides a revealing general framework for modeling the representations and mechanism underlying syntactic processing.We show how a particular dynamical model, the Visitation Set Gravitation model of Tabor, Juliano, and Tanenhaus (1997), develops syntactic representations and models a set of contingent frequency effects in parsing that are problematic for other models.We also present new simulations showing how the model accounts for semantic effects in parsing, and propose a new account of the distinction between syntactic and semantic incongruity.The results show how symbolic structures useful in parsing arise as emergent properties of connectionist dynamical systems.