I imagine like this: by continually reading a lot, you develop in the unconscious some dictionary of expression patterns. The dictionary (part of it is that of collocations) is somewhat automatically shaped by the volume of unconsciously accumulated corpus.

You would sometimes come across an expression which seems it can read in several different senses. But with that inner dictionary developed, you would be able to read it correctly, because you know what is the most natural expression to be selected in the situation or context.

That is, you can discern like this:

"Well, true, you can read this sentence in the senses p, q, and r. But if you wanted to say in the sense q or r, you would surely choose other more suitable expressions. So, I'd say that by far the most likely sense of the sentence is p."