Answer: The tiny white kitten curled up in its basket. "The tiny white kitten" is a noun phrase that serves as the subject of the sentence. The head word of the phrase is the word "kitten." All of the other words in the phrase modify the head word.
A noun phrase is a phrase that performs the same grammatical function as a noun, or that has a noun as its head.
The head of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic category of the phrase. In this example, the phrase is a noun phrase, so the head word is the noun (kitten). The other elements in the phrase modify the head word, and are therefore dependents.