Phonological recoding of English words and nonwords by Japanese ESL learners was examined. Forty-eight adults in three proficiency groups named English monosyllabic nonwords and words of two regularity types. It was expected that grapheme-phoneme recoding would lead to regular correct pronunciations on regular nonwords and body-rime recoding to irregular correct pronunciations on irregular nonwords. The results showed high accuracy rates on words and a higher incidence of error responses on both types of nonwords. However, error analyses of responses on nonwords revealed that less proficient readers dominantly used illegitimate sub-syllabic strategy using CV-type segmentation, which may have stemmed from their native language, Japanese.

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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.

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