English has a tendency for “heavy” or dominant elements to move to the end of a sentence, where heaviness or dominance is calculated mainly in term of the length of a constituent. This movement is presumably a processing strategy since dominant NPs are harder to encode and decode in initial or medial position than in final position. This is true especially where subject are concerned, but may occur even with other NPs in certain cases. NPs followed by relative clause modifiers, for example, are relatively long compared to other NPs and frequently undergo a shift toward the end of the sentence: