Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2021 Apr 5;63(5):403–415. doi: 10.1007/s10329-021-00891-0

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

© The Author(s) 2021

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

PMC Copyright notice

Fig. 1 — Basic architecture of the human language faculty. The lexicon provides inputs to the syntactic computational system (syntax), which combines these lexical items into a hierarchical phrase structure. This structure is then transferred to the two interpretive systems, the conceptual-intentional (CI) system for semantic interpretation and the sensorimotor (SM) system for phonological interpretation, including signs and other forms of surface realizations, via the two interfaces which roughly correspond to Logical Form (LF) and Phonetic Form (PF) in earlier versions of generative grammar. The syntax-CI connection is adaptive for internalization that takes place within an individual (thought, inference, planning, etc.), while the syntax-SM connection is for externalization (communication with other individuals)