• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.97-116
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• 1995

This study was conducted to investigate how syntaction and pragmatic constraints influence the sentential representation and memory accessibility. In order to seperate the syntactic constraints from the pragmatic constraint from the pragmatic constraints,the syntactic role of constituent in the sentence (subject or object) and the order of mention(first or second) were manipulted.After each sentence was presented by RSVP procedure,the probe recognition time was measured to investigate memory accessibility.In Experiment 1,in which SOA interval was 255ms,it was found that the subject of a sentece were more accessible than the object and participants first in a sentence were more accessible than participants mentioned later.However, in Experiment 2,in which SOA interval was 1540ms,it was found that participants mentioned first in a sentence were more accessible than participants mentioned later while there was no significant difference between the subject and object of a sentece.These results suggest that the syntactic and pragmatic constraints have an independent effect on the initial senential representation at the early stage of constructing representation,but as time passes only the pragmatic constraints influence sentential representation.These results also support a theoretical position which assumes that sentential representation is constructed through the process of convergent statisfaction of multiple constraints.