Although English and German are both Germanic languages, due to various historical changes, many of their cognates are no longer easily recognizable. This study examined whether knowledge of language history can be beneficial to learners when learning English-German cognates. Thirty-five English-speaking second language (L2) learners of…

This study aimed to examine how second language (L2) readers process and comprehend paired sentences based on the causal and semantic relatedness of the sentences. Causal relatedness refers to the cause-and-effect relations between the events described, whereas semantic relatedness refers to the similarity of meaning conveyed by the sentences. In…

This study investigated the role of morphological and contextual information in inferring the meaning of unknown L2 words during reading. Four groups of college-level ESL students, beginning (n?=?34), intermediate (n?=?27), high-intermediate (n?=?21), and advanced (n?=?25), chose the inferred meanings of 20 pseudo compounds (e.g.,…

Compares the reading processing strategies of native and proficient nonnative speakers of Chinese. At the word level natives show a phonological strategy, while nonnatives mix phonological and visual processing. At the sentence level natives mix visual and semantic strategies, and nonnatives prefer visual processing. (LMO)

Used computers to observe when foreign language (FL) readers look up meaning of unfamiliar words when reading FL text. Experiments with 82 English-speaking Dutch students from grades 10 and 11 show look-up behavior was clearly influenced by perceived word relevance, modestly influenced by reader's vocabulary knowledge, and not influenced by…