How do linguists study how people produce and understand sentences?

Linguists and psychologists study how people produce and understand sentences primarily through the discipline of psycholinguistics. This field investigates the psychological aspects of language, including memory, perceptual strategies, and speech perception, often by testing the validity of linguistic models.12

Historically, researchers used generative grammar—a theory developed by Noam Chomsky—to model language processing. Early experiments attempted to show that the complexity of a sentence, such as the number of transformations required to produce it, directly correlated with the time needed for a person to process or comprehend it.12

While these early studies were influential, many findings proved controversial or inconclusive, leading researchers to be more cautious about using formal grammars as direct models for human processing. Today, the field has moved toward more functionally and socially oriented models, though generative theories remain a vital source for understanding the formal properties of language and their implications for human cognition.12