Cognitive Meaning

How we understand the meaning of anything - 

I propose 'knowledge structures' which we are aware of through our commonsense experience/knowledge into which sentences fit in as having values, to create the understanding.

Suppose someone says to you - the ball rolled along the ground. Now, you have to have KNOWN through experience (/plain knowledge) that "something rolls along something" or "things roll along things". This is a knowledge structure. Into this knowledge structure, fit in the specific values of 'ball' and 'ground'. This is the only way I can understand something like 'the ball rolled along the ground'. Otherwise the gelling of the definitions of the individual words in a sentence via rules of grammar, with the right sense taken of every part, is just too complex for the brain to understand the meanings of sentences immediately.

The key part in this above knowledge structure is the 'rolling along'-ness. If one doesn't understand the phenomenon of 'rolling along'-ness via prior commonsense knowledge/experience, it is just impossible to grasp the true meaning of the ball having rolled along the ground, which is what the sentence says.

Consider an illustrative example - Suppose someone writes the following sentence in, say, an email to you. 'You have to know other things too (as well as John)'. This is not a clearly written sentence. This isn't proper English. There is ambiguity - does he mean to say 'you have to know other things too and one of those things is John (i.e. knowledge of John, the person)' or 'You have to know other things too as well as John has to know other things'? 

Here, to resolve the ambiguity, the mind selects amongst these 2 GENERAL and FAMILIAR knowledge structures (hazily approximated via reading the sentence 2-3 times) - 'someone having to know other things too and one of them being knowledge of the other thing', and 'someone having to know other things too as well as the other thing having to know other things'. Any other mechanism is just too complex for rapid understanding. 

(Note : The 'other thing' mentioned in the 2 knowledge structures above, if unclear, means the element in the bracket - John).