Then, you do some transformations. Finally, you go through a pronunciation stage and you have the surface structure, or the final sentence. Here's a harder one because it involves the passive. The cookie is stolen by the boy. Psychological evidence for transformations.
Early studies rewrote sentences into transformed versions.
I have you read lots of these and measure reading time. The more transformations you have to undo, the longer it should take. Note the problem with unconfounding reading time from the number of words in the sentence. For example, NP doesn't mean anything, it's just a marker to hold a piece of information. Not very elegant.