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PhilGoetz comments on The ideas you're not ready to post - Less Wrong
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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.
i believe that linguists would typically claim that it is formed by legitimate rules of English syntax, but point out that there might be processing constraints on humans that eliminate some syntactically well formed sentences from the category of grammatical sentences of English.
Eh, I could read it, with some stack juggling. I can even force myself to parse the "buffalo" sentence ;-P
You can force yourself to parse the sentence but I suspect that the part of your brain that you use to parse it is different from the one you use in normal reading and in fact closer to the part of the brain you use to solve a puzzle.
I puzzle what goes where, but the bit that holds the parse once I've assembled it feels the same as normal.
The result isn't as important as the process in this case. Even if the result is stored the same way, for the purpose of William's statement it's only necessary that the process is sufficiently different.
A bit like described in this Stephen Bond piece?