APA Dictionary of Psychology

in the transformational generative grammar developed by Noam Chomsky, the structure of a grammatical sentence as it actually occurs in speech or writing, as opposed to its underlying deep structure or abstract logical form. In Chomsky’s theory, the surface structure of a sentence is generated from the deep structure by a series of transformational rules involving the addition, deletion, or reordering of sentence elements. Psycholinguists have investigated whether and to what extent this may serve as a model for the cognitive processes involved in forming and interpreting sentences.