The advantage of first mention in Korean the temporal contributions of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors.

Using Korean, we investigated how syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors influence the representation of a sentence, in particular, the relative accessibility of different components of a sentence representation. In six experiments, participants performed a probe recognition task after reading each of a series of sentences. We manipulated the rate at which each word of the sentence was presented (250 and 500ms) and the interval between the sentence-final word and the probe-recognition test word (immediate, 500ms delay, and 1000ms delay). We also manipulated the syntactic position (subject versus object), semantic role (agent versus patient), and order of mention (first- versus second-mentioned participant) of the probed item. Pragmatic factors (the order of mention) strongly influenced accessibility immediately and through the longest delay, whereas syntactic and semantic factors had little effect.