The study explored the contribution of prior knowledge and reliance on L1 syntactic knowledge to L2 written sentence comprehension. Participants, 102 native Hebrew speakers at three education levels (junior high, high school, and postsecondary), answered questions in two sentence categories: Semantically plausible sentences that readers can understand by linking their content words to prior knowledge; semantically neutral sentences, whose comprehension requires adequate syntactic processing. To track the benefits of linguistic transfer from Hebrew (L1) to English (L2), the study manipulated the languages’ cross‐linguistic structural similarity. The results suggest that Hebrew‐speaking students rely on prior knowledge and/or on structural similarities between Hebrew and English to interpret English sentences. When they cannot rely on either of these two factors, they manifest remarkably poor understanding of quite basic English constructions even at the postsecondary level

中文翻译：

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L2句子理解中依赖先验知识和L1/L2结构相似性的两面性

该研究探讨了先验知识和对 L1 句法知识的依赖对 L2 书面句子理解的贡献。参与者是三个教育级别（初中、高中和高等教育）的 102 名以希伯来语为母语的人，他们回答了两个句子类别的问题： 读者可以通过将其内容词与先验知识联系起来而理解的语义合理的句子；语义中性的句子，其理解需要足够的句法处理。为了追踪从希伯来语 (L1) 到英语 (L2) 的语言转换的好处，该研究操纵了语言的跨语言结构相似性。结果表明，说希伯来语的学生依靠先验知识和/或希伯来语和英语之间的结构相似性来解释英语句子。