Analyzing the Interpretation of Logical Relations by Japanese EFL Learners in Reading Comprehension

This study investigates how Japanese English as a Foreign Language（EFL）learners recognize logical relations in English texts, focusing on connectives. In the first experiment, a multiple-choice test using connectives revealed that identifying general-specific relations was the most challenging task. This difficulty arose mainly from confusion between general-specific and cause-effect relations. Furthermore, this confusion also occurred when participants were asked to predict the content following the connective, for example. In addition, when the passages from Experiment 1 were translated into Japanese, the accuracy rate for general-specific relations remained low, with similar errors caused by confusion between general-specific and cause-effect relations. The findings of this study highlight that understanding general-specific relations, which are particularly difficult to recognize, is one of the keys to achieving more accurate reading comprehension in English.