Grammatical Encoding
The term Grammatical Encoding refers to a set of procedures that integrate lexical and syntactic information during language production. Speech errors known as “word exchanges” give insight into how grammatical encoding works. Two examples of word exchanges are given in this video:
a. The kitchen had a hole full of floors.
b. We loved to learn the desert.
The prevailing explanation for these errors is that grammatical encoding performs two types of procedure in parallel: categorial procedures and functional procedures. Categorial procedures assign a lexical category (noun, verb, adjective) to a selected lemma, whereas functional procedures build syntactic structure. Grammatical encoding is blindly automatic, inserting words based on lexical category alone, without regard to meaning. Word exchanges are often accompanied by the “stranding” of closed class elements. For example, in “we loved to learn the desert”, the past tense suffix -ed should appear on the verb ‘learn’, but instead remains fixed in its original position on the first verb. Word exchanges
exhibiting stranding provide graphic evidence of the automaticity of functional procedures that build syntactic structure as we speak.