ABSTRACT
Psychology.—In its initial stages, research on language processing in experimental psychology (see also →ORAL, READING, TEXT, WRITING) was largely inspired by the development of formal linguistic theories such as Noam Chomsky’s generative-transformational grammar (→GRAMMAR). Despite the immediate impact of this theory on the first research conducted in psycholinguistics, it quickly became clear that the formal description proposed in linguistics could not be envisaged as a relevant characterization of the mental representations and cognitive operations at play during language processing (→REPRESENTATION).
