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Abstract

We describ e a part of the stim ulus sen tences of a German language pro cessing ERP exp erimen t using a con text-free grammar and represen t di eren t pro cessing preferences by its unam biguous partitions. The pro cessing is mo deled by deterministic pushdo wn automata. Using a theorem pro ven by Mo ore, we map these automata onto discrete time dynamical systems acting at the unit square, where the pro cessing preferences are represen ted by a con trol parameter. The actual states of the automata are rectangles lying in the unit square that can be interpreted as cylinder sets in the con text of sym bolic dynamics theory . We sho w that applying a wrong pro cessing preference to a certain input string leads to an unwanted invarian t set in the parsers dynamics. Then, syn tactic reanalysis and repair can be mo deled by a switc hing of the con trol parameter | in analogy to phase transitions observ ed in brain dynamics. We argue that ERP comp onen ts are indicators of these bifurcations and prop ose an ERP-lik e measure of the parsing mo del.