ABSTRACT
When cognitive psychology was new, one of the best games we could play was to study how people comprehend and produce sentences. I recall talking with Jim Jenkins and some of his other students about how one could possibly do an experiment about “colorless green ideas.” It all seemed so important. Chomsky’s (1957, 1965) new transformational grammar seemed to show us that people are capable of cognitive accomplishments that were astonishing but not necessarily mysterious. We just had to show, in experimentally clever ways, that people could really do the things that a transformational grammar described; we very badly wanted to show that the Chomskian enterprise was on the right track in developing an account of these accomplishments; and we knew we had to develop some kind of theory about what went on in the mind when a person was doing wondrous things with language.
