&gt; I doubt anyone reading &quot;Alice drove down the street in her car&quot; actually parsed the grammatical structure of that sentence, either explicitly or implicitly.<p>You do need to analyze a sentence to understand it. Think of a classical attachment ambiguity such as &quot;the boy saw the girl with the telescope&quot;. There are two readings of the sentence, and just like a Gestalt, you&#x27;re typically perceiving it as one or the other. This involves a process of disambiguation, which is evidence that you have parsed the sentence.