As noted above, the psycholinguist addresses the question of how
the mentally represented grammar (linguistic competence) is employed in the
production and comprehension of speech (linguistic performance). The most
direct way to approach this relationship is to adopt the hypothesis that a generative
grammar can simply be regarded as itself providing an account of how we
understand and produce sentences in real time. From the point of view of language
comprehension, this gives rise to the following (highly simplified) model