Rules and meanings

We talked about how if a person is never taught the reasons why a rule is in place, they will eventually get to a point where the person will reject the rules they are given because they have no meaning to base those rules on. It struck me as an interesting comparison to the difference between teaching language to a human, and to a parrot that mimics voices. A human learning a language will understand the meanings and grammar behind the words and phrases it learns, but a parrot just learns basic association, not the actual definitions of things, and thus never really understands what the words mean in the larger scheme of things. This is probably why some pet parrots will end up repeating seemingly nonsensical words over and over: they have no understanding of what the word is, outside of it is something that is said. Thoughts on how else this connects to sets of rules?