JOURNAL OF VERBAL LEARNING AND VERBAL BEHAVIOR 19, 695-704 (1980) Leading Questions and Memory Pragmatic Constraints

Previous research as shown that presuppositions can alter memory, but these results depend upon a restricted class of pragmatic onditions. Given a specified source with a presumed intention to mislead, listeners might not enter such presuppositions i to memory. In two experiments, ubjects first observed an accident depicted in a series of slides. In Experiment 1,the leading questions with no source led subjects to "remember " the presup-posed facts; attribution of the questions to a lawyer representing the defendant eliminated that effect. In the second experiment, the presuppositions were introduced in a transcript of an eyewitness account of the accident. If the account was from a neutral bystander, subjects "remembered " the presupposed facts; yet if the account came from the driver causing the accident, the same pr supposed facts were not remembered. These results reflect he influ-ence of pragmatic conditions on normal language processing, conditions normally excluded from laboratory experiments. Presuppositions in leading questions are generally held to directly affect language comprehension and memory (cf. Hornby