Linguistics An Introduction

In section 14, we discussed how words are accessed and retrieved from the mental lexicon. In this section, we shall look into the processing of sentences, focusing on sentence comprehension. Notice firstly that there is a fundamental difference between lexical and syntactic processing: the lexemes in a language, being finite in number, are stored in the mental lexicon. Sentences, however, typically are not stored (if they were, then we would be unable to produce any new sentences, i.e. sentences that we have never heard or read before). Indeed, sentence repetition and sentence recognition experiments have shown that normally syntactic structures are extremely transient: memory for syntax is unreliable only half a minute after a sentence has been heard or read (was the second sentence in this paragraph Focusing on sentence comprehension, in this section, we shall look into the processing of sentences or In this section, we shall look into the processing of sentences, focusing on sentence comprehension?). Hence, whereas word recognition can be described as a retrieval process with the goal of finding an entry in the mental lexicon, sentence processing does not involve accessing and retrieving entries from a mental repository.

If the representations of sentences are not retrieved from a memory store, this means that they are constructed on-line (in a step-by-step fashion) in accordance with syntactic principles or rules.