No, the academic consensus is pretty much the opposite. For example by trying to rigorously state the way we form yes&#x2F;no sentences in english - the process that converts &quot;the man who has written the book will be followed&quot; to &quot;will the man who has written the book be followed?&quot; instead of the incorrect &quot;has the man who written the book will be followed?&quot; - you will find that the rules must involve imposing some sort of tree structure on the original sentence. The fact that we do it correctly all of the time on sentences we&#x27;ve never seen before means that we must have parsed the original sentence.<p>(Example sentences taken from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;he.palgrave.com&#x2F;page&#x2F;detail&#x2F;syntactic-theory-geoffrey-poole&#x2F;?sf1=barcode&amp;st1=9780230243934" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;he.palgrave.com&#x2F;page&#x2F;detail&#x2F;syntactic-theory-geoffre...</a>, although any introductory linguistics&#x2F;syntax textbooks will spend a few pages making the case that humans understand language by first parsing it into some kind of tree structure).