The other day I came across this headline:

Thames swan counters hope numbers recover after avian flu

It got me thinking of how we read things. We know (probably subconsciously) that English is mainly Subject-Verb-Object so unless there's a word that suggests otherwise, the first thing we're looking for is a noun to be the subject. That's fine, we have "Thames". So the next token is a verb, right? Nope, "swan" doesn't fit because if it were a verb it would be "swans", so we conclude that's actually a noun phrase talking about a "Thames swan", a swan on the Thames. Fine.

Now can we have a verb? "counters". Yeah, ok, that's good. Next, an object noun? "hope". That'll do as well. What do we do with "numbers"? Because this is headline-ese we expect to miss out words like "the" and "that" so this is a subordinate clause about the hope. The hope is that numbers recover after avian flu.

But why is the Thames swan countering this hope? Wait. Counters can be a noun too, people who count. Let's back track. The Thames swan counters are our subject -- people who count swans -- and they hope numbers (of swans, presumably) recover after avian flu. That's actually the right reading.

But do we actually read left-to-right like that? I think I actually approach it a bit more holistically. I see a bag of things that could be nouns and could be verbs, and perhaps wonder alongh the way to the correct meaning whether hope is numbering anything, or whether hope numbers are the thing that is recovering.

Have psycholinguists done studies of what people's brains do when they read sentences like this?