This article enters the debate about the complex and dynamical nature of second language acquisition (SLA) by discussing and commenting on Pallotti's critique of Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). Pallotti's critique brings to the fore the argument that, due to its anti-reductionist stance, CDST research fails to observe three fundamental…

Proposes a dynamical systems approach to parsing in which syntactic hypotheses are associated with attractors in a metric space. The experiments discussed documented various contingent frequency effects that cut across traditional linguistic grains, each of which was predicted by the dynamical systems model. (47 references) (Author/CK)

This personal progress report, telling where the author is and where he thinks the field of reading is, is a response to both the "know-more movement" (based on an explosive seeking of greater knowledge of the reading process) and the "know-nothing movement" (a systems-oriented movement based on tightly structured arbitrarily…