Headline and grouping

[Joel S. Berson]

On Yahoo -- for me, at att.myyahoo.com -- a headline for an AP "Top Story":

"Apple denies iPhones store user location (AP)"

Who's being denied what?

Actually, here store is a verb, but I was led down the wrong path by
thinking of an "iPhones store", a place to be sold iPhones.

Do readers/speakers of English have a left-to-right grouping
tendency, constructing language units by attaching the current word
closely to the previous?  (I formed a noun phrase, rather than a
noun-verb sequence.)  I've noticed a similar phenomenon when I work
on crossword puzzles -- if I know the first few letters of the
answer, I tend to make them the beginning of a long word, rather than
forming a short word from some initial letters and looking for a
second word to complete the answer.

Joel

Joel

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