Your brain reparses this sentence the moment it realizes it guessed wrong

Sentences like 'The horse raced past the barn fell' walk readers confidently down one grammatical path, then yank the floor out from under them mid-sentence. Psycholinguist Thomas Bever showed the brain commits to the most likely structure word by word as it reads, and stumbles hard when a later word forces a total rebuild. The stumble reveals that we parse sentences in real time, not after they're finished.

— Thomas G. Bever, The Cognitive Basis for Linguistic Structures — In J.R. Hayes (ed.), Cognition and the Development of Language, Wiley, 1970