uncle from Detroit on the street. 2. b) I met on the street my rich uncle from Detroit. 3. a) I sent the recipes from the paper that I was talking about to you. 3. b) I sent to you the recipes from the paper that I was talking about. If a constituent is not considered 'heavy' or 'complex', the shift would not make grammatical sense or would be considered awkward to a native speaker of English, e.g. 4. a) I sent it to you. 4. b) *I sent to you it. In example 4, the verb sent has a personal pronoun as its direct object. Typically, nothing can intervene between a verb and its direct object in most dialects of English, e.g. 5. a) I consider the problem unsolvable. 5. b) *I consider unsolvable the problem. In example 5b, the NP the problem is not complex enough to be shifted. Heavy NP shift in Japanese Japanese is an SOV (subject, object, verb) language. Particles in Japanese encode syntactic functions, marking the relationship of the subject and object (NP) to the verb. This allows Japanese speakers to 'scramble' the order of particle-marked phrases which is important when considering word ordering biases such as heavy NP shift. In corpus studies and experiments, it has been shown that Japanese-speakers have a long-before-short bias, contrasting English biases of short-before-long in the presence of a heavy NP. In an experiment, participants had to create a sentence from a set of phrases that varied in length of the direct object (DO) and indirect object (IO) for dative verbs. In Japanese, the order for dative verbs is; subject (S) -indirect object (IO) -direct object (DO). For example, the 'short' phrase: Masako wa(S) otoko ni(IO) keeki o(DO) haitatusita(V), translates to, Masako delivered the cake to the man. In this study, participants chose this order for a short phrase the majority of the time, without rearranging the order of the IO and DO. However, when the DO and IO were lengthened, the participants were more likely to shift the longer phrase before the short phrase even if it switched the order from S-IO-DO to S-DO-IO. For example, the phrase: Masako wa(S) otoko ni(IO) sinbun de syookaisareta keeki o(DO) haitatusita(V). was shifted so that the long DO was before the short IO: Masako wa(S) sinbun de syookaisareta keeki o(DO) otoko ni(IO) haitatusita(V). If the IO was longer than the