Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2006
Ever since the derivational theory of complexity (DTC) apparently bit the dust in the late 1960s, experimental psycholinguistics have been afflicted by a dualism at least as troublesome as the mind/brain dichotomy, namely, the grammar/parser distinction. The idea that mentally represented grammar is something fully dissociated from the human language processor is less than compelling, yet it has implicitly informed much of the last half century's psycholinguistics practice on both sides of the formalist–functionalist divide.