It has been observed that syntactic changes occur from typical canonical
orderings when the constituents are heavy. Using Hawkins’ (1994) framework
such as the Early Immediate Constituents (EIC) principle, it was predicted
that Cantonese speakers would transform the construction of bei-[complex
direct object]-[indirect object] into a construction with a better ratio.
By using a variation of the elicited production paradigm, subjects were required to repeat the contents of a given sentence after a probe. It was demonstrated that the responses are sensitive to syntactic complexity of the constituents in the sentences. Since all stimuli were presented in a canonical order, a higher complexity would lead to a poor EIC ratio. In such a situation, speakers are more likely to reconstruct the sentence into a more efficient form. The results are also congruent with the claim that the human parser prefers basic orders to transformationally derived ones (Hawkins, 1994) and that the human parser assumes structures using the least effort (Fodor, 1998). However, due to the limitation of the setup, this cannot be tested statistically. The data also set out a promising map for further research.