There are three ways of understanding something that is spoken or written:

1. You can understand it through the ability to separate words in a sentence, by being able to correctly guess the spelling of the words, and by having a dictionary in which the words can be looked up. And the rest. “X Y Z”, where X means “I”, Y means “am”, Z means “hungry” becomes “I am hungry”.
2. You can understand it by knowing the words beforehand, and by “puzzling” the meaning of the sentence together. This basically means converting “X Y Z” into “I am hungry” in one’s head. In other words, the sentence is translated into one’s native language, and thus understood. Like #1, except without a dictionary, and generally much faster. Sometimes so fast it appears as if you didn’t do that translation.
3. You can understand the sentence “as is”, meaning no translation occurs. Instead, the individual words are associated with the stuff that makes up the meaning of the word, in the same fashion words in our native language have been given their meaning. “X Y Z” has a meaning all of its own. “X”, “Y”, and “Z” are the building blocks of the sentence.

Intriguing stuff. Speculations only, though am I wrong?