Two crosslinguistic experiments were conducted with 83 skilled readers from four contrasting L1 orthographic backgrounds. Experiment 1 tested the effects of blocking either visual or sound information on lexical decision-making. Experiment 2 examined the effects of heterographic homophones (e.g. eight and ate) on reading comprehension. Data from the two experiments demonstrate that the subjects utilize cognitive skills and strategies developed in their L 1 when reading English as an L2, suggesting that (a) L1-L2 cognitive process transfer does take place in L2 reading and also that (b) orthographic structure exerts a significant influence on cognitive processess in reading.
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