Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A dynamical systems model of language processing suggests a resolution of the debate about the influences of syntactic and lexical constraints on processing. Syntactic hypotheses are modeled as attractors which compete for the processor's trajectory. When accumulating evidence puts the processor close to an attractor, processing is quick and lexical differences are hard to detect. When the processor lands between several attractors, multiple hypotheses compete and lexical diiferences can tip the balance one way or the other. This approach allows us to be more explicit about the emergent properties of lexicalist models that are hypothesized to account for syntactic effects (MacDonald, Pearlmutter & Seidenbeig, 1994; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1994).