ABSTRACT
First language (L1) and second language (L2) proficiency were examined to assess certain factors contributing to reading comprehension. Letter detection, phonemic segmentation, cloze, and reading ability tests in L1 and L2 were employed. Two experiments were conducted, one testing native Spanish speakers and the other native Japanese speakers, both with English as L2. High performance on the cloze test was associated with faster reading times and higher comprehension. Higher L2 proficiency was associated with lower detection of the letter f in the word of. Both experiments found transfer effects of L1 to L2; however, less transfer was found when the two languages had dissimilar features. The findings from both experiments showed that top-down processing facilitates text comprehension and that top-down processing in L1 is related to L2 reading comprehension. The findings for f-detection are consistent with both the unitization and the structural explanations of text processing.
