COGNITIVE STRATEGIES IN DISCOURSE PROCESSING - A COMPARISON OF CHINESE AND ENGLISH SPEAKERS

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that, when processing a nonnat ive language, individuals tend to adopt the discourse processing strat egies that they use in their native language. In a natural language pr ocessing task native speakers of English and Chinese read English pass ages that were heavily loaded with zero anaphora. Native Chinese speak ers found the passages more comprehensible than did native English spe akers, presumably because zero anaphora occurs muck more often in Chin ese than in English. However, in an artificial laboratory task, native Chinese speakers did not find it easier to recover the missing refere nts than did native English speakers, suggesting that the two groups w ere equally capable of reference retrieval although they differed in t heir natural language discourse-processing strategies. These results s uggest that the strategies used for processing foreign-language discou rse are influenced by those used to process native-language discourse.