Journal Article

The two‐sided nature of reliance on prior knowledge and on L1/L2 structural similarity in L2 sentence comprehension

Miller, Paul, Rosenstein, Ofra, Meir, Irit

2020

Overview

The study explored the contribution of prior knowledge and reliance on L1 syntactic knowledge to L2 written sentence comprehension. Participants, 102 native Hebrew speakers at three education levels (junior high, high school, and postsecondary), answered questions in two sentence categories: Semantically plausible sentences that readers can understand by linking their content words to prior knowledge; semantically neutral sentences, whose comprehension requires adequate syntactic processing. To track the benefits of linguistic transfer from Hebrew (L1) to English (L2), the study manipulated the languages’ cross‐linguistic structural similarity. The results suggest that Hebrew‐speaking students rely on prior knowledge and/or on structural similarities between Hebrew and English to interpret English sentences. When they cannot rely on either of these two factors, they manifest remarkably poor understanding of quite basic English constructions even at the postsecondary level. The Challenge Prior knowledge, although crucial to L2 reading, may mask inadequate syntactic knowledge, another essential factor in skilled reading. Without support of prior knowledge or L1 transfer, L2 SC remains poor even at the postsecondary level. L2 reading instructors must detect and remedy these problems.

• Publisher: Wiley,American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages
• Subject: Cognitive Processes / Comprehension / Content words / Contrastive Linguistics / Educational attainment / English / English (Second Language) / English as a foreign language / English Instruction / explicit and implicit instruction / Hebrew language / High School Students / Junior High School Students / Knowledge / Language Processing / Languages / linguistic transfer / Linguistics / Literature Reviews / Native Language / Postsecondary Education / Prior knowledge / Prior Learning / Reading Ability / Reading Achievement / Reading Comprehension / Reading Difficulties / Reading Instruction / Reading Strategies / Reliance / Second language learning / Secondary schools / Semantics / Semiotics / Semitic Languages / Sentence structure / Sentences / Simplified language / Social Integration / Syntactic processing / Syntax / Teaching Methods / Text Structure / top‐down processing / Transfer of Training / Word Order / Word Recognition / written sentence comprehension