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Humans can generate and comprehend a stunning variety of conceptual messages, ranging from sophisticated types of mental representations, such as ideas, intentions, and propositions, to more primal messages that satisfy demands of the immediate environment, such as salutations and warnings. In order for these messages to be transmitted and received, however, they must be put into a physical form, such as a sound wave or a visual marking. As noted by the Swiss linguist de Saussure (2002), the relationship between mental concepts and physical manifestations of language is almost always arbitrary. The words cat, sat, and mat are quite similar in terms of how they sound, but are very dissimilar in meaning; one would expect otherwise if the relationship between sound and meaning was principled instead of arbitrary. Although the relationship between linguistic form and meaning is arbitrary, it is also highly systematic. For example, changing a PHONEME in a word predictably also changes its meaning (as in the cat, sat, and mat example). ​Human language is perhaps unique in the complexity of its linguistic forms (and, by implication, the system underlying these forms). Human language is compositional; that is, every sentence is made up of smaller linguistic units that have been combined in highly constrained ways. A standard view (Chomsky 1965, Pinker 1999) is that units and rules of combination exist at the levels of sound (phonemes and PHONOLOGY), words (MORPHEMES and MORPHOLOGY), and sentences (words and phrases, and SYNTAX). Collectively, these rules comprise a grammar that defines the permissible linguistic forms in the language. These forms are systematically related to, but distinct from, linguistic meaning (SEMANTICS). ​Linguistic theories, however, are based on linguistic description and observation and therefore have an uncertain relation to the psychological underpinnings of human language. Researchers interested in describing the psychologically relevant aspects of linguistic form require their own methods and evidence. Furthermore, psychological theories must not only describe the relevant linguistic forms but also the processes that assemble these forms (during language production) and disassemble them (during language comprehension). Such theories should also explain how these forms are associated with a speaker’s (or hearer’s) semantic and contextual knowledge. Here, we review some of what we have learned about the psychology of linguistic form, as it pertains to sounds, words, and sentences. Sounds ​Sound units. Since the advent of speech research, one of the most intensively pursued topics in speech science has been the search for the fundamental sound units of language. Many researchers have found evidence for phonological units that are abstract (i.e., generalizations across any number of heard utterances, rather than memories of specific utterances) and componential (constituent elements that operate as part of a combinatorial system). However, there is other evidence for less abstract phonological forms that may be stored as whole words. As a result two competing hypotheses about phonological units have emerged: an abstract componential one vs. a holistic one. ​The more widespread view is the componential one. It posits abstract units that typically relate either to abstract versions of the articulatory gestures used to produce the speech sounds (Liberman and Mattingly 1985, Browman and Goldstein 1990), or to ones derived from descriptive units of phonological theory such as

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