Abstract

The present article reports on a study that investigated the effects of topic familiarity and linguistic difficulty on the reading strategies and mental representations of nonnative readers of Chinese. Four passages - topic familiar/language easy, topic familiar/language difficult, topic unfamiliar/language easy, and topic unfamiliar/language difficult -were used. Forty American college third-year CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) learners were divided into four groups according to their familiarity with the reading topics, and were randomly assigned to read either the language easy or difficult passage. Subjects performed the think-aloud task to reveal their on-line processing strategies; the mental representations of what they read were reflected in their subsequent written recall of text content. Results suggest that subjects in all four groups predominantly engaged in local-level processing with the exception of two types of global-level processing: monitoring one's comprehension and generation of inferences. While monitoring efforts were motivated by both topic familiarity and linguistic difficulty, inferencing events were primarily facilitated by topic familiarity. In addition, topic familiarity was also found to have a facilitative effect on the mental representations of the reading passages whereas no effects due to linguistic difficulty was found.