We are Eliza: A whole lot of what we think is reasoned debate is pattern-matching on other people's sentences, without ever parsing them.

I wrote a bit about this in 1998.

But I'm not as enthused about this topic as I was then, because then I believed that parsing a sentence was reasonable. Now I believe that humans don't parse sentences even when reading carefully. The bird the cat the dog chased chased flew. Any linguist today would tell you that's a perfectly fine English sentence. It isn't. And if people don't parse grammatic structures to just 2 levels of recursion, I doubt recursion, and generative grammars, are involved at all.