This article first describes Jacques Mehler's initial efforts to make psycholinguistics and, more generally, the cognitive sciences better known during his first years in Paris. Two lines of research on sentence perception, that we conducted in collaboration with Jacques, are then presented to illustrate his focus. In the Seventies, sentence perception was a central topic in psycholinguistics, with contrasting proposals of syntactic autonomy and interactivity being confronted. A first series of experiments aimed at defining the role of syntax in lexical selection process as revealed by the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of the words in a sentence. The second series, using the phoneme monitoring technique, examined the clause as a processing unit during the auditory perception of sentences. These results confirm the fundamental role played by syntax in language processing.

本文首先描述了雅克·梅勒 (Jacques Mehler) 在他在巴黎的最初几年中为使心理语言学以及更广泛地了解认知科学而广为人知的初步努力。我们与 Jacques 合作进行了两条关于句子感知的研究，以说明他的重点。在七十年代，句子感知是心理语言学的一个中心话题，面临着句法自主性和交互性的对比建议。第一系列实验旨在定义句法在词汇选择过程中的作用，正如句子中单词的快速序列视觉呈现 (RSVP) 所揭示的那样。第二个系列，使用音素监测技术，在句子的听觉感知过程中检查作为处理单元的从句。