I think observing how children learn their native language is pretty informative. They can speak and understand it very well, whether or not they were taught formal grammar at school. Personally, I know very, very little of Polish grammar (i.e. of my native language), and only little bit more of English grammar - and that is only because foreign language courses are pretty heavily grammar-laden.<p>I&#x27;m not a linguist, but seeing how people a) can understand sentences that are grammatically malformed perfectly well, b) can easily derive meaning out of &quot;sentences&quot; stripped out of verbs (&quot;I her dinner cinema Washington&quot;), it seems to me that most of the work is being done by pattern-matching to known words and phrases. E.g. &quot;drove down the street&quot; is a kind of semantic unit on its own.<p>Again, I&#x27;m not a linguist, but a lot of introspection as well as observing other people strongly suggest to me that humans do anything <i>but</i> parsing grammatical structures.