Understanding text in a second language: a psychological approach to an SLA problem

Abstract

The study is an attempt to assess the way in which second language learners form mental representations of information they read. Subjects were asked to read passages in their first and second languages and to demonstrate comprehension of the information by using it to make a judgement of a visual display of the same information. Following this there was a surprise recognition task to determine whether or not they still had access to verbatim representations of the passages. The results showed that information read in a second language is represented differently from the same information read in subjects' first language.