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

Bibliographic Data

ID8936892
AuthorsOfra Rosenstein (Department of Special Education University of Haifa Haifa Israel, corresponding author), Irit Meir (Department of Hebrew Language University of Haifa Haifa Israel), Paul Miller (0000-0002-7934-8119, Department of Special Education University of Haifa Haifa Israel)
Year2020
Volume53
Issue3
Pages576-593
Publication date2020-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueForeign Language Annals (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0015-718X • E-ISSN: 1944-9720
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/flan.12478
OpenAlexW3082542764
LanguageEN
References cited32

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

Comprehension · Hebrew · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Sentence · Similarity (geometry · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Philosophy · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development · Second Language Acquisition and Learning

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