Reading, Perceptual Strategies and Contrastive Analysis¹

Psycholinguistic research in sentence perception supports a model of the reading process in which the reader matches expectancies set up by sampling previous syntactic clues in a text with the structural signals which follow. Such expectancies are language specific, and when they are applied to reading a second language various confusions and comprehension breakdowns result. Examples from three learning situations, Japanese reading English, Persians reading English, and English speakers reading Hindi, are presented and an analysis is made of the competing syntactic processes which account for the confusions arising in each case–negation, relativization and co–reference. The evidence lends some support for a model of second language acquisition like that proposed by Numser (1971) as well as a general apriori “predictive” version of the contrastive analysis hypothesis.