The mean lean grammar machine meets the human mind: Empirical investigations of the mental status of linguistic rules

This paper describes the results of several studies which address the question whether speakers' representations of the patterns of their language are indeed as general as the rules proposed by most modern linguists. The next two sections summarize the results of several experimental studies designed to provide evidence about the generality of speakers' knowledge of inflectional morphology. Then a construction which has been extensively studied by syntacticians working in the generative tradition is discussed: English questions with long distance dependencies. The final section discusses the implications of these studies for linguistic theory and methodology.