The process of taking in linguistic structures and generating a representation of their meaning is an important cognitive process of the human brain.
Language is necessary for communication of ideas and intentions.
For these reasons it is important to study linguistic processing. The languages spoken by humans are referred to as the natural languages while the languages native to computers are referred to as the programming languages. Compared to natural languages, programming languages are severely limited as to semantics and tolerance for syntactical errors. This means that you must tell the computer what to do down to the smallest detail, and with perfect syntax. However, most people can understand the underlying meaning behind a grammatically sloppy utterance.