A widely held idea in the psychology of language is that the formal and functional categories used in structural linguistics to describe language phenomena have a psychological reality for the organization of utterances. In the present article, we demonstrate that this belief is untenable. An alternative theoretical approach envisages direct translation of meaning relations, provided by a semantic matrix that intervenes within a pragmatic framework, in superficial lexical sequences; productive registers are created through implicitly learned substitution analogies. This affirmation, which is closer to the viewpoint of the cognitive neurosciences, has important implications for the speech therapy of morphosyntactic difficulties.