ABSTRACT
According to Chomsky’s (1965) competence hypothesis, a model of language use will incorporate a generative grammar which expresses the users’ knowledge of the language (p. 9). A grammar which expresses the users’ knowledge of the language is said to be psychologically real or to have psychological reality. There can obviously be no doubt that language users have knowledge of the language they are using, but by the early 1970s it was becoming clear that transformational-generative grammars (see TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE GRAMMAR) could not be successfully incorporated in psycholinguistic models of language comprehension and production (Fodor el al., 1974; Levelt, 1974), that is, they might not be psychologically real.
