Abstract
The current study examines how similarities in sentence processing strategies between a speaker's L1 affect his understanding of L2. The comprehension of Japanese by speakers of Chinese, Korean, and English is compared. The results demonstrate that with the same methods of instruction and amount of practice, comprehension accuracy overall ranked according to the degree of proximity in sentence processing strategies. Furthermore, the decline in accuracy and the use of foreign cues as the complexity of sentences increased was most notable in the most distant languages compared. The results suggest that speakers of more psycholinguistically distant languages may require more processing resources than speakers of closer languages in the sentence processing of the L2s.
