Comparative Studies on the Roles of Linguistic Knowledge and Sentence Processing Speed in L2 Listening and Reading Comprehension in an EFL Tertiary Setting

The present study investigated the relative contributions of vocabulary knowledge, grammar knowledge, and processing speed to second language listening and reading comprehension. Seventy-five Korean university students participated in the study. Results showed the three tested components had a significant portion of shared variance in explaining LC (33.9%) and RC (41.8%) without any unique significant contribution of each component. Two comprehension processes were similar in that vocabulary knowledge in its corresponding presentation mode and parsing best predicted a respective comprehension construct but different in that processing speed was part of the best combination of predictors only in RC.