The study looked at JFL learners' sentence comprehension strategies. A number of psycholinguistic studies in the Competition Model (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989, MacWhinney, 2003, 2004) have shown that linguistic cues used for sentence comprehension differ cross-linguistically. For example, in Japanese, case markers are cues for correct sentence comprehension. In sentences such as 'Naomi o Ichiro ga ketobashita' or 'Ichiro ga Naomi o ketobashita' have the same agent regardless of the word order, because the case marker 'ga' functions to determine the agent. On the other hand, in English, the word order is the determiner in agent identification. The Competition Model claims that these cross-linguistic differences in sentence comprehension cues are determined by the probabilistic linguistic patterns used in language input. Thus, beginning learners who have less input in L2 are less likely to use their L2 strategy but transfer their L1 strategy.
Based on this claim, the study examined the use of sentence comprehension strategies used by elementary JFL learners whose L1 is English, and also analyzed the language patterns used in textbooks as input. The sentence comprehension strategies were measured by the subject identification task.
The results showed that L2 learners used the correct case- marking cue in Japanese sentence comprehension without transferring their L1 word order cue even at the elementary level. The textbook analysis of input patterns revealed that the input that the participants were receiving from the textbook was consistently emphasized on the case-marking use, but not the word order use. This study indicated that consistent linguistic input of the case- marking use facilitated the prompt acquisition of correct comprehension linguistic cues in L2 while the inconsistent patterns of word order use in input restrained the transfer of their L1 strategy. This study suggests that instruction can foster the optimal attentional learning process by manipulating input.