The original source of the sentence is Eric Wanner (1980) “The ATN and the Sausage Machine: Which One is Baloney?” Cognition, volume 8, pages 209-225.
Wanner also republished as "The Parser's Window" in The Congnitive Representation of Speech 1981, pages 211-223.
Wanner starts from the sentence:
a. [The beautiful young woman][the man the girl loved][met on a criuse ship in Maine][died of cholera in 1972]. (brackets in original text)
Then he writes:
b. The woman the man the girl loved met died.
and finally
c. Women men girls love meet die.
Sentence "c" is preceeded by the comment "is very difficult to comprehend" in Wanner's paper.
Wanner is commenting on Frazier and Fodor's 1978 "The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model" Cognition, volume 6, pages 291-325 which discusses sentences a and b, (excecpt sentence "a" had no brackets and the date was 1962).
Wanner's point is to rebute a hypothesis of Frazier and Fodor that sentence "a" is easier to understand than sentence "b", because the bracketed blocks are about six words, six words being the parser's window. Wanner points out that:
it is possible to construct an equivalent sentence which is short enough to fall entirely in the PPP's window yet is very difficult to comprehend:
c. Women men girls love meet die.
So in context it is understandable what meaning Wanner intends for "Women men girls love meet die", but it is difficult to comprehend, which is Wanner's point.
