Лингвофорум

Further confirmation of this strategy comes from so-called 'centre
embeddings' – sentences which have a Chinese box-like structure,
one lying inside the other. The following is a double centre embedding
– one sentence is inside another which is inside yet another.

THE MAN THE GIRL THE BOY MET BELIEVED LAUGHED.


THE MAN                               LAUGHED.
        THE GIRL             BELIEVED
                 THE BOY MET


(The man laughed: the girl believed the man; the boy met the girl.)

Blumenthal (1966) tested to see what happened when sentences of
this type were memorized. He noted that subjects tended to recall
them as noun–verb sequences:
THE MAN, THE GIRL AND THE BOY MET, BELIEVED AND LAUGHED.
Their immediate reaction to being presented with such an unusual
sentence was to utilize the canonical sentoid strategy even though it
was, strictly speaking, irrelevant.

The strategy or working principle which follows from assumption
1 seems to be: 'Divide each sentence up into sentoids by looking for
noun phrase–verb (–noun phrase) sequences.' This is sometimes referred
to as the canonical sentoid strategy, since noun phrase–verb–noun phrase
is the 'canonical' or standard form of an English sentence. It is clear
that we need such a strategy when we distinguish sentoids, since there
are often no acoustic clues to help us divide a sentence up (Chapter 1).
A clear confirmation of this strategy comes when people are presented
with a sentence such as:
LLOYD KICKED THE BALL KICKED IT.
which was said in a football commentary. Most people deny that it
is possible, claiming it must be:
LLOYD KICKED THE BALL THEN KICKED IT AGAIN.
But it is a well-formed English sentence, as shown by the similar
one:
LLOYD THROWN THE BALL KICKED IT.
People just cannot think of the interpretation 'to whom the ball was
kicked', the canonical sentoid strategy is too strong. And similar
examples abound in the literature, perhaps the most famous being:
THE HORSE RACED PAST THE BARN FELL.
A common comment about this one is: 'I can't understand it because
I don't know the word BARNFELL.' The alternative interpretation
of RACED as 'which was raced' is rarely considered.